Fortunate few thankful to have survived

Michael Phillips turns in his front room and spots a stranger on the street. "Welcome to our home," he exclaims. There is no door to 2119 Delaware any more. Actually, there is almost no house.

Humour, like faith, is a salve and, truthfully, residents on this short block in Joplin are feeling lucky.

Every home here was either drastically damaged or obliterated by the monster tornado that scoured so much of this Midwestern city a week ago, leaving 139 dead and hundreds wounded, homeless or both. But no one on the block died.

Many of the living are now bereft of nearly everything they owned. "It's just stuff," says Michael.

"Just stuff" are words you hear repeatedly as survivors delve through half-vapourised sitting-rooms, studies and bedrooms looking for things that mostly are no longer there - photographs, jewellery, family souvenirs. Material losses barely matter when the lives of loved ones have been spared. They find this perspective because the deeper suffering of others is so close.

Here on Delaware, few are more aware of their relative fortune than Ron and Mary Kaiser, who live - lived - at 2116, directly across from Michael. Their house, Ron says, was undoubtedly "the worst built on the block", yet roughly half of it is still, sort of, standing, including a small hallway where the two of them lay when the twister struck.

"I wasn't afraid. What good would fear do us?" Mary asks. Ron shows what used to be their bedroom, with furniture under an open sky. The furniture is someone else's - it flew in.

If Michael Phillips can afford passing levity, maybe it's because he wasn't in Joplin last Monday. His partner, Kathy Gale, was alone in the house as the storm approached. They kept in contact by mobile through it all.

"I watched the warnings on TV - and, you know, usually I am nonchalant when the sirens are going. Then I realised. This one was massive," he says.

Michael grasped Kathy's panic when the swivelling fist of the tornado pummelled the house. "I heard everything. I heard the house explode," he tells me. "A couple of times, I thought I had lost her. I could hear her saying, 'Oh, my God, Oh, my God'. Then I could tell she was trapped."

Kathy takes me to the side of the house. "I knelt in that corner, next to the steps. A wall collapsed on top of me. I think it saved me."

Just how long Kathy remained under the rubble she is not sure, but after a while she heard voices. Her granddaughter and son-in-law Paul had come. She pushed a hand through the bricks and wondered why no one saw it. She reached for a piece of wood that would stick out further. Paul spotted it first. "Seeing that big hand reach down the hole towards me was about the best thing I've seen in my life."

Like so many parts of Joplin, this district has been shredded so completely it defies comprehension. These neighbours lived through it. Miracles like these are to be remembered as well as the myriad tales of loss.

- INDEPENDENT