![]() “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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