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JOPLIN, Mo. — When the tornado hit Joplin, Lori Lowrey and her husband, James, wedged themselves between the toilet and the wall in her parent’s bathroom.

Her parents clung to each other in the bathtub.

“We’d been watching the news and they’d said to take cover, so we knew it was coming,” Lowrey said, referring to the F4 tornado that killed at least 118 people Sunday.

Hundreds of homes and businesses were leveled.

“When it hit, there was all this debris and insulation-type stuff blowing in from underneath the door, so we couldn’t breathe very well,” Lowrey told KHI News Service, her voice breaking with emotion.

“It seemed to go on forever,” she said, “but when we finally got to open the door, all we could see was blue sky. The house – the walls, the roof, everything – was gone. The neighborhood is gone. Some neighbors are still missing.”

Triage

They heard that a medical triage center had been set up at the Wildwood Southern Baptist Church, about a mile from the remains of her parents’ house.

“It took us two hours to get there because all the debris,” Lowrey said. “We saw people who were missing fingers, people with deep lacerations… people with compound fractures. I’m sure there were some who didn’t make it.”

The tornado has been declared the deadliest in U.S. history.

Lowrey, 47, is chief operations officer at the Community Health Center of Southeast Kansas. She and her husband live in Pittsburg.

“There’s nothing you can do to prepare for something like this,” Lowrey said. “I mean, how can you? It was total devastation.”

The tornado destroyed St. John’s Regional Medical Center, one of Joplin’s three medical hospitals. The others, Freeman Health System and Freeman East, remained open.

Regional response

Patients – those hospitalized at the time of the tornado as well as the injured – have been dispatched to hospitals throughout the region.

Via Christi Hospital in Pittsburg reported seeing 76 patients after the tornado; 30 were admitted.

Pittsburg is about 30 miles northwest of Joplin.

Dr. Josh Brueggemann, 33, lives in Pittsburg. Shortly before the storm hit Joplin, he was home, planting flowers.

“I started raining so I went inside and watched the weather on TV,” he said. “You could see the tornado coming – they had it on the St. John’s (hospital) Weather Cam before it went out.”

Minutes later, Brueggemann’s wife learned that her cousin’s house in Joplin had been hit and that she and her two sons were trapped beneath the stairs.

“She got the call, and then the phone went dead,” Brueggemann said.

He put a chainsaw, a shovel, and a pick axe in his car and headed for Joplin.

“We couldn’t get anywhere near her (cousin’s) house because of all the debris,” he said. “So we got out and walked for a couple miles. We still couldn’t get anywhere close to it, but we helped a disabled lady who was trapped in her basement.”

At that point, Brueggemann learned that his wife’s cousin and nephews had been freed. He left for St. John’s Regional Medical Center to see if he could help.

“There was so much devastation, I wasn’t prepared for it,” he said. “It was really unbelievable.”

Organized chaos

At the hospital, Brueggemann was sent to a triage center that had been set up at Memorial Hall.

“Some firefighters from Galena gave me a ride,” he said.

“I was surprised by how organized things were – they were chaotic, but they were organized. Several staff from St. John’s were there,” Brueggemann said. “By the end of the night, we had far more health care workers than we could use, which was nice to know.”

Brueggemann said he cleaned and treated a few lacerations wounds before leaving for home around midnight.

On Monday, he happened to be on duty when an elderly woman hurt by the tornado was brought to the Pittsburg hospital’s intensive care unit. He admitted her.

“She’s nonverbal, debilitated, and had no identification,” he said late Tuesday morning. “She had sod (grass) in her mouth and mud was caked in the crevices of her body. She has a pelvic fracture. We don’t know who she is, she’s Jane Doe.”

Four of the seven nursing homes in Joplin suffered major damages. A fifth facility, The Greenbrier, was reduced to rubble, leaving 11 residents and one employee dead.

According to the Missouri Health Care Association, 90 residents and staff at The Greenbrier survived.

In the tornado’s aftermath, Brueggemann said he will never underestimate the trauma and sheer havoc that accompany disasters.

“We need to take disaster preparedness very seriously,” he said. “We see things like Sept. 11 or the tornados in Tuscaloosa or Birmingham (Ala.), and we tend to think it won’t happen in our back yard.

“This has taught me that it can happen in your back yard,” Brueggemann said. “It did Sunday.”

St. John’s Hospital in Joplin was a 367-bed tertiary care hospital that drew patients from all over southeast Kansas. Its federally designated service area reaches north of Fort Scott and west of Iola and Parsons.

Maude Norton Memorial Hospital in Columbus and Oswego Community Hospital are two critical access hospitals in southeast Kansas that routinely referred patients to St. John’s in Joplin prior to the tornado.