At Joplin Wal-Mart, Death, Survival and the ‘Best Soda I Ever Had’.

[Gordon Ray Kissinger]

At Joplin Wal-Mart, Death, Survival and the ‘Best Soda I Ever Had’.

http://blogs.wsj.com/dispatch/2011/05/25/at-joplin-walmart-tale-of-...

May 25, 2011, 2:10 PM ET

By Amy Merrick

When Cameron Paul, a Walmart employee in Joplin, Mo., was growing up, he and his father would go storm-chasing. From what seemed to be a safe distance, Mr. Paul’s father, a freelance photographer, would shoot pictures of funnel clouds. In southwest Missouri, there were plenty to keep them busy.

“When other people might have fire drills, we’d have tornado drills,” Mr. Paul said. Many residents had storm shelters in their yards, and tornado warnings happened so often, “it was almost like crying wolf,” he said.

None of that prepared him for Sunday evening, when Mr. Paul, 19 years old, was working as a customer-service manager at a Walmart Supercenter in Joplin. The employees knew a storm was coming and herded customers to the back of the store, as they’d been trained. Mr. Paul and a co-worker stayed in front, hurrying more people inside from the parking lot. Some said they lived in mobile homes and came to Walmart to seek shelter.

Shortly before the tornado hit, one woman left the building because she wanted to buy groceries and was told she couldn’t until the storm passed. Mr. Paul doesn’t know what happened to her. Some people who waited in their cars in the parking lot didn’t survive.

He stayed by the store entrance until the pressure of the approaching tornado sucked the doors off the building. He and his co-worker ran to the back of the store and dove into the electronics department, where about 30 people huddled. Throughout the giant store, which stretches from 15th to 20th Streets along Range Line Road, somewhere between 100 and 200 people were trying to ride out the storm.

The force of the tornado lifted the metal roof off the building and dropped pieces of it onto the employees and customers. Part of the roof struck Mr. Paul’s back, but he didn’t feel pain. Large pieces of metal framing toppled toward him, but a set of DVD display cases stopped their fall. All he could think was, “Hold on.”

He watched helplessly as a support beam fell onto a couple and their child only a few feet away, killing them. After that, he kept his head down.

The tornado passed. Huge chunks of hail began to fall. Looking up, Mr. Paul saw a woman clutching a child near a shopping cart. He called them over and stood, holding one end of the broken piece of roof, so they could crouch beneath it. He held a milk crate over his own head to protect himself from the hail.

“At the point when the hail was hitting, I couldn’t stop laughing,” he said. “Just knowing that the hell that passed over us, the tornado, was gone and I had actually somehow made it. When I saw it rip off the front doors, I thought, this is where we’re all going to die.”

When the hail was over, Mr. Paul, whose father had been an Army medic, and a co-worker pulled injured people out of the debris. They handed out gauze and bandages from first-aid kits that had flown off the pharmacy shelves.

One woman had a gash on her arm so deep they could see the bone. Mr. Paul found a rag and told her to apply pressure. The woman objected, saying the rag was dirty. “We’re all going to be getting tetanus shots,” Mr. Paul told her. The area reeked of propane and natural gas.

Amid the wreckage stood a dog, unhurt. No one knew how it had gotten there, and a few minutes later, it disappeared.

Several customers appeared to have broken backs, including a woman with three children. Mr. Paul and his co-workers carefully placed blankets around the injured adults. Another Walmart employee wrapped trash bags around the children to keep them warm.

Mr. Paul checked the pulse of a man lying on the floor, then put a comforter over him so the children wouldn’t see. But as Mr. Paul led a boy out of the store, the child said, “There’s a dead guy over there.”

It took an hour to get everyone out. Mr. Paul was one of the last to leave. He picked up one of the unopened cans of Pepsi that littered the ground around him. “That was the best soda I ever had in my life,” he says. He handed the register keys to his manager and told him he wouldn’t be coming into work the next day. They both laughed.

In the parking lot, Mr. Paul was reunited with his parents, who had driven from their home about 20 minutes away. Paramedics were arriving to take the injured to hospitals. Crews cut bodies out of smashed cars. A doctor with a hacksaw performed emergency amputations.

The next day, Mr. Paul went to a doctor at Missouri Southern State University to have him look at the bump on his head—his only injury from the disaster. But first, the doctor pulled up a chair and told Mr. Paul: “I want to know your story.”

 

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I used to work for Wal-Mart at the corporate headquarters 'Home Office' marketing dept., here in

Bentonville, AR. My wife is still employed there. This tragic event happened to our dear Missouri

neighbors and their family members just North of us. Please continue to pray for the residents of Joplin.  

 

[Sandra]

Sad that they had that monster Tornado and of course zero is to busy right now to go and offer any condolences until he feels like it on Sunday. What a leader... Bush would of been torn to shreds by the lefties