Bootheel town deals with wake of twister

Published Tuesday, April 4, 2006

CARUTHERSVILLE (AP) - Dale Dormer hurried his elderly in-laws into the basement, then stood and watched the massive tornado emerge from the greenish-blue sky.

"It looked like it was a mile wide," Dormer said yesterday. "I’ve never seen anything that scared me so bad."

Dormer’s fear was for good reason. The twister that tore through this Missouri Bootheel town of 6,700 residents Sunday night destroyed or badly damaged about 60 percent of the community, city officials said.

It was part of a storm system that killed three people in Missouri and 27 throughout the Midwest and South. In Missouri, a man in his 20s died while hiking in Castlewood State Park in St. Louis County when a tree limb fell on him. Another person died when the storm struck his mobile home in Stoddard County.

The only death in Pemiscot County, where Caruthersville is the county seat, was in a rural area, where a man died at his home.

Gov. Matt Blunt issued two executive orders yesterday declaring state of emergency, activating the Missouri National Guard and state agencies to provide assistance.

About 50 Missouri National Guardsmen were sent to support recovery efforts in the Caruthersville area and will remain on duty for at least three days.

By midday yesterday, about 40 people in Caruthersville originally listed as missing were all accounted for, Pemiscot County Sheriff Tommy Greenwell said. Sixty-five people were treated for mostly minor injuries; none was hospitalized.

Mayor Diane Sayre said the devastation was hard to take, but she took comfort in the fact that no one was killed. "We’re a resilient group of people in this community," Sayre said. "We care about each other. And as bad as this is, we’ll pull through it."

Some in this community in one of the most economically depressed regions of the state credited tornado sirens with providing enough warning to allow them to seek shelter. Still, considering the devastation, the lack of deaths was amazing.

Most of the town’s southern end was flattened. Trees, some 150 to 200 years old, were uprooted. Mobile homes were tossed several hundred feet. Century-old brick homes were in crumbled heaps. The winds twisted lamp posts into pretzels. Snapped power poles dangled over streets; the downed lines were sprawled among the roof tiles, timber, sheet metal and shattered glass along every street over a stretch of roughly 64 square blocks.

The National Weather Service sent survey crews to the area yesterday and determined that Caruthersville was struck by at least an F-3 tornado on the Fujita scale, with winds of 158 to 206 mph, said meteorologist Jody Aaron with the NWS in Memphis, Tenn.

Caruthersville High School was badly damaged on the second and third floors, said Misty McDowell, principal of the town’s lone grade school. The middle school also was damaged, with the roof ripped off the cafeteria. Neither building is expected to be useable through the rest of the school year. Students on spring break this week will likely have an extra week off before classes resume, but where that will be is uncertain.

At the entrance to town, police asked for identification; only residents, emergency workers and media were allowed in. A dusk-to-dawn curfew was mandatory.

The town’s largest employer, the Casino Aztar, appeared to have escaped damage but was still closed because it had no running water.

Ameren Corp. spokesman Tim Fox said 36,000 homes and businesses in Missouri were still without power yesterday afternoon.