“We have a spirit in our community that we are going to work together,” she said. A sign on a fence near the site where Joplin high school once stood. And Joplin had an advantage, Brady said – it was a town built on strong connections. Residents mobilized from the earliest moments, bringing injured people to safety and cleaning streets. The scale of the catastrophe was so staggering, federal officials warned the city it should expect to lose at least 25% of its population.īut the city insisted on a message of unrelenting hope and optimism for its future. Calls about domestic violence grew in the first year. Eighteen people died by suicide after the tornado, said Stephanie Brady, the executive director of the Community Clinic of Southwest Missouri, who co-chaired the long-term recovery team. The storm affected everyone in the city of 50,000 in some way, and took a toll on mental health. The recovery ahead was monumental: Joplin had lost 4,000 homes, more than 500 businesses and critical infrastructure such as segments of the sewage system. It had destroyed a third of the city, including a hospital and several schools, and displaced more than 9,000 residents. The storm had violently torn through Joplin, killing people seeking refuge wherever they could find it, such as a Pizza Hut manager who shepherded people into the restaurant’s freezer and a family scrambling for safety inside a Home Depot. Photograph: Ed Zurga/REUTERS A citizen-led effort that solicited feedbackīy the time it dissipated, the tornado was among the deadliest in US history. “People want to return to normal,” she said, “but at the same time the disaster very often presents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for a community to build back better.” The tornado was one of the deadliest in US history. Jane Cage, a small business owner who became a leader of Joplin’s rebuilding efforts, says communities face a choice between rebuilding as quickly as possible, often the same way things were before, or taking the time to plan and build in a more resilient way. Whether it be towns leveled by wildfires in the west, or by tornadoes like the ones that hit Kentucky last month, catastrophe can also present an opportunity to improve. Joplin has managed to achieve an often elusive post-disaster goal: not just restoring what was there before, but building a more resilient community.Īs the climate crisis intensifies natural disasters, residents here say Joplin offers crucial lessons in how cities can recover and how the US can better prepare. A locally led recovery effort has created a thriving city with a larger population, new educational institutions, more businesses and thousands of houses that are better able to withstand extreme weather. But more than a decade later, Joplin’s transformation has been a positive one.
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