Shaken survivors relive tornado terror

Doctors and nurses at the main hospital in Joplin, Missouri, had just minutes to rush patients away from windows and outside walls before the city was ravaged by a massive tornado that left at least 116 people dead.

"I've heard people talk about being in tornadoes and saying it felt like the building was breathing," said Rod Pace, a manager at the nine-storey hospital. "It was just like that."

He held on to double doors fitted with magnets to keep them closed at up to 45kg of pressure. They flew open anyway, tossing him into a corridor.

The hospital was a ruin yesterday. X-rays were found 110km away. The devastation elsewhere in Joplin was even worse. Shopping centres, churches, schools, whole blocks had been crushed or badly damaged.

"You see pictures of World War II, the devastation and all that with the bombing. That's really what it looked like," said Kerry Sanchetta, the headmaster of the demolished high school.

As more rain fell and the smell of leaking gas filled the air, tales of loss and survival were exchanged. Rescue workers found bodies in cars that had been picked up and dumped by the twister. Others died in homes shattered by the wind.

Survivors told of split-second decisions that saved their lives, like Jeff Lehr, a reporter for the Joplin Globe, who finally had to abandon a cat that refused to come out from under his bed and sprint to the basement of his apartment building, or Isaac Duncan, who fled into the cold storage room of a petrol station shop.

Duncan and a friend found themselves crammed into the shop's cooler with about 20 strangers. The sound of their terror and of the tornado passing overhead was captured by Duncan's mobile phone and yesterday was playing on news stations around the world. "Jesus, Jesus, Jesus," one woman is heard groaning.

When the roar subsided they came out. "The only thing that was left standing was the cooler we were in, everything that was around it was gone," said Duncan.

The twister gouged a path 1.5km wide and 9.5km long right through Joplin. Officials said a quarter of the city of 60,000 people was badly damaged.

- Independent