![]() ![]() “You're scared and you're thankful to be alive. ![]() And Tiffany Stout said her heart aches for Kentucky tornado victims. And you don't have control over everything.”īut that realization is hard won. “There's an awareness that, life is precious and short, and you control what you control, prepare for the future. “I think there's a psychological awareness across this community,” he said. Graves said that kind environmental hit or shared trauma can show up in higher rates of suicide and drug abuse. “Because this was such a massive trauma and so many people were exposed, that is, um, an environmental hit to them.” “Those people who have had the most trauma are more likely to develop problems after a subsequent trauma,” he said. He said trauma can make people more vulnerable to the next big setback. He said the old adage “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” doesn’t apply here. That’s a normal response, said Joplin psychiatrist Charles Graves. “Because I know I have to talk to myself: 'Breathe, you can’t start crying, you can’t freak out, keep it together and let’s be logical.'” “You can look around the room when you’re gathered there and know who’s been through something like this,” she said. They stick out when there’s a tornado watch at work. Tiffany Stout said it’s easy to tell which people survived the tornado. “I remember hearing this awful screaming. “You kind of have an out of body experience,” she says. Her mother, Tiffany Stout, says she remembers the feeling of the roof coming off and their house lifting off the ground. KCUR Allie Stout, left, was three years old at the time of the tornado she keeps a tornado bag with important possessions close at hand. And inside I have my blanket that I liked to have when I was a kid. “And, I have it right over here, it’s just this little backpack. “My tornado bag is what I like to call it,” she said. And she keeps her most important possessions close at hand. But Allie Stout said she still gets anxious when it’s stormy. “We spin around in circles, and we get in a house, and we lie down, and it's blasting off, and we have to lie on the ground,” Allie Stout said at the time.įast forward ten and half years, and the tiny girl caught in an imaginary whirlwind is now a confident, athletic 14-year-old. And, like many children here in the weeks that followed, she relived the storm over and over again. Worse yet, she said, her children lost their innocence. Like more than 9,000 of her fellow citizens, Stout lost most of her belongings. Her husband’s shoulder was dislocated, her dog was missing. Broken gas lines were hissing, downed power lines were sparking. When she crawled from the wreckage covered in mud, splinters and insulation, her neighborhood as she knew it had vanished. “You know you kind of have an out of body experience. And Shane had his arms over us trying to hold us down,” she recalled. And I could feel us coming off the ground. “It was almost instantly the roof came off our house. She was wedged in a hallway with her husband Shane and their two small children. Tiffany Stout, a human resources director here, narrowly survived. “If you're from here and you, and you look at over this landscape, I still see the scars,” Micklethwaite said. But, Micklethwaite said, even all these years later the pain remains fresh. New buildings and small trees are growing between stretches of open space. Ten years ago, heaps of splintered rubble stretched for miles. Micklethwaite was president of Joplin’s school board when an EF5 tornado struck that city of 50,000 people. ![]()
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