![]() “I’d say it goes ’bout two, two-and-a-half miles to the east, and maybe seven or eight to the west,” David, a government disaster-relief expert dispatched by the Army Corps of Engineers, tells me. The wreckage stretches as far as the eye can see. In some cases, there’s no house to speak of, just cement slabs where it once rested. Some houses bear the names of the people who lived there, with spray-painted messages: “All OK” or “safe.” A few others show tallies of the dead. Relief workers have marked most houses with a spray-painted red X-condemned. ![]() Walking the neighborhood, I find a Bible, a pencil sketch of Frodo and Sam from the Lord of the Rings, a stuffed horse, old VHS tapes. There, a handful of houses still stand, windows ripped out, roofs shredded, lawns filled with the detritus of disaster. I follow a procession of dump trucks headed east of Main Street into what is left of a modest, leafy neighborhood. It stripped the trees of their branches and bark. It’s been less than a month since a category F-5 tornado, the most powerful there is, cut a violent path through Joplin, population 49,000, ripping the roofs off houses and the houses from their foundations. But before long the scene changes abruptly to one of panoramic destruction, an unrecognizable confetti of splintered wood, steel, glass, and rubble. ![]() Turning onto Main Street and heading south, a familiar tableau of small-town America rolls by-mom-and-pop diner, barber shop, hardware store, and plenty of vacant storefronts-all of it untouched. Photographs by Andy Krollĭriving into Joplin, Missouri, from the north, you wouldn’t know the most wicked tornado to strike this country in six decades had swept through this small town. ![]()
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