First Hand Account Of Missouri Killer Tornado

Thanks to Paula Wheeler for sharing this with us… This is from a friend of her who lives in Aurora, Missouri.

Wow, wow, and more wow. We were in Seneca Friday evening and again yesterday, what a difference a day makes. We happened to be at my daughter’s house a little bit north of Joplin on Saturday night, and when it hit we were safely in the basement, but I called my step dad after it went through Aurora to go check on our house since the ground was so saturated from all the excessive rains and flooding I was sure that there would be trees on our house or at least down. The funnel must have lifted when going over Aurora because all it did was drop debris everywhere, We have pieces of people houses in our yard and in the fields. Someone here in Aurora found a wedding dress from the bridal shop in Seneca.

I stopped by and talked to a friend of mine and she said her sister lost everything. In Granby, on our way to Seneca, we saw house after house totally demolished and people just walking around looking so lost, with trees and powerlines everywhere. You feel so helpless, and you don’t want to stare, but how can you not look?

I stopped at a convenience store and this young guy, probably about 22 kept telling this story over and over again like he was in shock and maybe if he repeated it enough times he might actually believe it. But he and his friend were on one of the main routes to Joplin which is about 17 miles North of Seneca, and hail was pelting everyone, (there were pieces of hail that you couldn’t fit your hand around) and the wind whipped a piece of Hail into the windshield on the drivers side and entered through the windshield like a giant bullet and killed the driver instantly, I won’t go into all the rest of the story, but I felt so sorry for the kid he was obviously still in shock. A sheriff’s deputy and an ER worker and the store clerk were all listening to him patiently tell the story repeatedly. The clerk told me that she called a friend to tell him to be sure to take cover and while they were on the phone the guys wife was sliced in half by debris, I’m guessing a piece of tin off of a building maybe. The same clerk was driving to her mom’s, (she said if I’m dying, I’m dying with my family) she stopped and told a guy that was mowing his lawn to get inside, and then his house blew away. She said she was able to find out that he survived though. She was saying it like a robot with this very unemotional dazed look in her eyes. I felt so sad for her.

My daughter’s brother in law and his wife live just North of Seneca, his pickup was picked up and slammed down on it’s top, and his wife is the emergency management director for a hospital in Joplin, she had to go through Miami Oklahoma to get to Joplin because all the routes to Joplin were closed.

The EMS created a makeshift triage at a seed store since no one could make it to the Joplin hospitals in a reasonable amount of time.

Weird, sad, WoW.

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