© Eric Thayer/ ReutersRyan Harper paused while looking for a missing friend after a devastating tornado hit Joplin, Mo. yesterday.
From the second floor, he watched the storm approach. The swirling rain began to form about a mile away.
Then the glass doors he was holding onto - with a 100-pound magnet to keep them locked - were suddenly pulled open. Pace was sucked outside briefly and then pushed back in like a rag doll, all the while clinging to the handles.
He headed for the hospital's interior for cover. Then he heard a roar. Pace and a co-worker pushed on a door trying to keep it shut, but it kept swaying.
"I've heard people talk about being in tornadoes and saying it felt like the building was breathing,'' Pace said. "It was just like that.''
High school in ruins
A high school principal had just finished presiding over graduation when he learned that his school had been destroyed.
Joplin High School held its graduation Sunday afternoon at Missouri Southern State University. Principal Kerry Sachetta was among 75 to 100 people still lingering on campus when the twister hit. They took cover in a university basement.
After the storm passed, Sachetta began receiving text messages warning him about severe damage at the high school. He found the top part of the auditorium gone, the band and music rooms caved in, windows blown out, and his office missing its roof. Trees outside the school had been stripped of their limbs.
Two churches across the street were "completely gone,'' and Sachetta was stunned by the condition of the nearby Franklin Technology Center, which looked like it had been bombed. "I couldn't even make out the side of the building,'' he said.
Saved by a collapse
Joshua Wohlford and his family were saved by a shelf of toys.
With the tornado bearing down on their trailer, Wohlford, his pregnant girlfriend, and their two toddlers sought shelter at a Walmart. They escaped serious injury when a shelf of toys partly collapsed, forming a tent over them as they huddled on the floor.
"It was 15 minutes of hell,'' Wohlford said. "We were buried.''
The family was taken to a hospital, where a fleet of school buses brought in people with minor injuries. Wohlford helped unload passengers.
Yesterday, one of those buses took his family to a shelter downtown because their car had been totally wrecked by the storm in the Walmart parking lot.
A homestead scattered
Kelley Fritz and her husband spent part of yesterday rummaging through the remains of a storage building. But they quickly realized they'd never find the things they had stored there or the many belongings that were ripped from their home after the twister tore away the roof.
When the worst of the weather had passed, their sons, both Eagle Scouts, went out to survey the neighborhood and quickly realized every home was destroyed.
"My sons had deceased children in their arms when they came back,'' she said. "My husband and I went out and saw two or three dead bodies on the ground."
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