Rescue and recovery

Jeanie Graham lays a photo album upon her kitchen table and begins to matter-of-factly explain each picture of the disaster that changed her life.

"Here's what our home used to look like," she says, showing the log cabin home with a view of the lake -- a picturesque structure built by her husband, Eddie.

She flips a few pages.

"See how everything collapsed into the basement?" she asks. "Everybody always says go to the basement. It's a good thing we didn't have time to make it that far."

She flips a few more.

"Here's the board that Eddie landed on. You can see the blood there."

Each picture may be worth 1,000 words, but these don't begin to tell the story.

Jeanie pauses, looks through her kitchen window. Her new house is several miles from her old home, several miles from her old life. She sees a hummingbird buzzing near a feeder that she put out not long ago.

"Oh, look!" she exclaims. "It's the first hummingbird of the season."

It's a rare moment for Jeanie. She doesn't get too excited about things anymore. She doesn't look forward to events like she used to. She just takes every day as it comes.

It's the psychological effect of trauma, of having your home, your life, your belongings sucked into a blender then slammed to the ground.

Monday marks the one-year anniversary of the tornado that touched down outside Marble Hill. The F-3 twister killed a 12-year-old boy named Billy Hoover, injured 16 people and destroyed six homes. There were two main destruction sites, one at Lake of the Hills subdivision, where Jeanie lived, and the other on County Road 512.

No warning was issued for the tornado after it picked up steam in Wayne County. The same cell devastated towns in Illinois, killing one and injuring six in Dongola.

A year later, Jeanie is comfortable talking about the tornado, but the details are a sad reminder of the life and home she once had. Eddie, a 66-year-old former Bollinger County sheriff and coroner, politely refuses to talk about it, not that he remembers much of the event, anyway.

They both want to get on with their lives and try not to think about that terrible night, yet Jeanie thinks about it every day. There's no way not to. Not even Boots, the cat, is the same.

Jeanie, 56, would rather not draw any attention to herself. She'd rather be left alone. But she realizes this isn't just her story.

It's a story about how people, dozens of people, many of them strangers, came to rescue her and her husband.

And for that, she is thankful.

**************

Beep ... beep .... beep.

Eddie and Jeanie didn't turn off the tiny television set in their bedroom before they settled into bed that night. The couple had a habit of keeping the television on. They'd watch David Letterman, doze off to sleep, then wake up later and turn it off. The occasional warning alert wasn't enough to wake Jeanie on most nights, but like so many hidden blessings that would happen over the next several hours, this time it did. It was just loud enough.

She looked at the clock: 12:25 a.m.

Jeanie, not wearing her glasses, couldn't see the television. She grabbed her glasses and headed to the living room to the larger television set. It was quiet. There was no violent wind, rain nor hail. But it was, after all, springtime in Southeast Missouri, and one can never be too cautious about weather warnings. Just two weeks earlier, there was a hailstorm that pelted the region, and tornadoes spelled disaster in some counties in the Bootheel just days earlier.

Still half asleep, turned the television to KFVS-12 and watched for awhile. A forecaster announced that a tornado warning had been issued for parts of Illinois, and those counties were scrolling at the bottom of the screen.

It's already passed, Jeanie thought.

A tornado watch was issued at 11:12 p.m. that night and, as Jeanie was watching the report at 12:34 a.m., the National Weather Service issued a thunderstorm warning for Bollinger County.

She looked out the window, saw nothing unusual and turned her attention back to the television. Then she heard a crack.

She looked out her window again. Debris was flying past it.

Jeanie spun back toward the bedroom to wake up her husband. Out the window, her deck boards lifted up like reverse dominoes, one after another, peeling toward the sky. Trees flew past.

"Eddie! Eddie! Wake up!" she exclaimed. "We've got to get to the basement! Tornado!"

Eddie, groggy and vaguely aware of what was going on, woke up and began to reach for a pair of pants.

"Forget the pants!" she yelled again.

It was already too late to get to the basement, too late to grab Boots, the friendly black cat, who was outside somewhere. Too late to crawl under a heavy piece of furniture.

All they could do is hold onto each other inside the bathroom, adjacent the bedroom.

The only thing Jeanie heard was high-pitched wind.

But she saw everything.

Hanging onto her husband for dear life, the toilet she was standing near flew past her face, the porcelain base broken. Trees, branches and debris flew wildly, spinning around her.

Then, she saw the tornado.

The menace, "the finger of God" as it's called in the movie "Twister," wasn't the black image that storm chasers capture on the Discovery Channel.

Jeanie's tornado was green. Angry, nasty, pond-scum green.

As the floorboards were sucked from underneath Eddie and Jeanie, she felt the splinters enter her feet. She knew then her house was falling apart. Jeanie assumed she and her husband would fall into the basement, but the typical rules of gravity don't apply in the middle of a tornado.

Jeanie and Eddie didn't go down, at least not right away.

*************

Betty Hastings is an extrovert, an animated, self-proclaimed talkaholic, curious in nature. Perhaps above all else, she can't say no to anybody, not even a one-legged goose named Lucy that no one else wanted.

Lucy was housed in a 10-by-10-foot cage with no bottom. It was one of dozens of animals Betty took under her wing. Betty has a room in her house dedicated to birds -- the Hastings raise quail to train dogs. They also keep other birds, like cockatiels, as pets.

She also has a large fish aquarium and, last year, she had five dogs, a cat, a rabbit and a couple of pheasants.

But that Saturday afternoon, Betty turned her attention to plant life. She spent most of her day planting a flower bed. She takes pride in making her yard look pretty; she puts in her part and Mother Nature takes care of the rest. With a small fishing lake in her back yard and trees surrounding the place, the Lake of the Hills subdivision is pristine.

While planting her flowers, she noticed something under the porch. Her husband, Jon, had used a jack several months earlier to do some work on the deck and, instead of putting it in its proper place, he left it lying underneath the deck.

He'll never be able to find that the next time he needs it, Betty thought to herself.

With all the work she did that Saturday, Betty had no trouble falling asleep that night.

But sometime after midnight, Jon heard something hitting against the house. The Hastings live in an earthen home, so the building is insulated from most noises.

Jon went to check it out. He didn't see a tornado, but he saw enough to wake Betty. They had prepared to take cover in the bathroom in the middle of their house.

"Betty, I think we're having another hailstorm," Jon said.

Jon sat on the bed to put on a pair of pants, and Betty went to the door.

As she reached for the doorknob, she heard a glass explosion immediately followed by another one and another one.

Pow, pow, pow, pow, pow. Like an automatic weapon, the tornado took out the windows in the front of the house.

Betty opened the door to shield herself. Everything went black.

Jon was knocked to the floor by a large piece of flying debris, maybe a piece of sheet rock.

Jon and Betty were three feet apart in the bedroom. While the pressure of the tornado was pulling Jon up, it was pushing Betty down.

A television set flew across the room and smashed into the wall in between them.

Betty could see nothing but heard everything.

Finally, it was over.

"Jon!" she cried out. "Jon!"

No answer.

"Jon!"

She felt the rain dripping on her face.

"Jon?" she called out, at least six times with no answer.

Finally, Jon answered back: "Are you OK?"

They were both alive. He had temporarily been knocked out, but other than a few scrapes and bruises, both were uninjured.

Dazed and shocked, Betty tried to pull herself together. Just five minutes earlier, she was sound asleep.

They walked through what was left of their house. It wasn't until she walked halfway through the rubble when it hit her.

"Oh my God, Jon," she said. "I think it's a tornado."

**************

When disasters strike in Bollinger County, there's one man everybody looks to: Jim Bollinger.

The 28-year insurance salesman is Mr. Emergency. He's the Marble Hill volunteer fire chief. He's also the county emergency management coordinator and reserve sheriff deputy and reserve coroner. He serves, he trains, he teaches, and he's always looking out for trouble.

Late that Saturday night and early Sunday morning, he found it.

Bollinger subscribes to a weather Web site on his personal computer. He was monitoring the storm that had picked up pace in Wayne County.

He became concerned at the images he was seeing on his radar. He saw that the storm's image on the screen had started to rotate, but he had heard no tornado warnings from the National Weather Service.

He called the NWS and told a representative what he saw. The NWS meteorologist saw the same thing, but the rotation was not strong enough to issue a warning. Bollinger was trying to plead his case for a tornado warning when he was interrupted.

"Can you hold on a minute? I've got a firefighter calling on the other line," Bollinger said.

It was Jack Watt, a Marble Hill and Glen Allen volunteer firefighter who lives on Highway 51 south of Marble Hill.

Lightning woke Watt from his sleep, and he knew the area was under tornado watches for that evening. He called Bollinger, wondering if the NWS was going to issue a warning.

"Jim, it's Jack Watt," Watt said.

"What's going on at your place?" Bollinger asked

"We're getting hail and a lot of rain," said Watt.

About that time, a huge chunk from Watt's shed tore away from the roof and slammed into a transformer.

"Oh, sh--!", Watt said.

And the phone went dead.

Bollinger switched back to the NWS, told the representative that a tornado had been spotted and hung up.

Disaster had found Bollinger County. The time for warnings was past. It was time to save lives.

*************

Jeanie could see nothing but black.

She gasped loudly for each breath.

Lying underneath a pile that was once part of her house, the left side of her body was pinned under rubble. Eddie was there too. They had flown about 40 feet in each other's arms and were still side-by-side -- not in their basement, but in Betty and Jon's driveway.

"Eddie, we've got to call for help," Jeanie said.

And so they started to yell. Eddie made a terrible gurgling sound, and Jeanie ordered him to stop talking. Jeanie would do the yelling.

"Help!" she yelled, over and over again. "Help!"

Meanwhile, Betty, now that she had realized her house had been hit by a tornado, found a pair of shoes and tip-toed her way to her Bronco II. The windows were smashed out, but it was still there. She reached in to grab her cell phone and a pack of cigarettes -- she really needed a cigarette.

About that time, she heard Jeanie's cries.

"We're over here," Jeanie said.

"Let me call the police, and I'll be right there," Betty said.

She dialed the sheriff's department, but the calls had already started coming in, and help was on the way. Betty went to check on her neighbors.

At about the same time Betty showed up, Mike Humes and his niece had also discovered the Grahams. Mike and his wife own a cabin on the lake, yards from the Grahams' house, and sometimes the extended family and friends visit the place on weekends.

"Hello, Eddie! Can you hear us?" Mike asked. Soon Mike also heard Jeanie's cries for help, and they followed the voices to the pile that used to be the cabin that Eddie built.

A huge wall was lying directly on top of Jeanie and Eddie. On top of that was a mound of debris -- two-by-fours, paneling, insulation. Lying at an angle on top of all that was a wall with cabinets. On the other side of that were tree branches. Underneath it all, one of Jeanie's legs and one of Eddie's legs were sticking out.

Mike could only move the wall a few inches. And when he did, Eddie loudly groaned. While trying to relieve one pressure, Mike added another.

After some trial and error, Mike found out what not to push on. He found a spot where he could apply pressure without harming them, and he found out what he could push on to relieve them, but he had no way of using one to leverage the other.

"Betty, do you know anything we could use?" he asked.

The jack, she thought.

Only one problem. It was pitch black, and their yards had turned into tornado alley. Trees, large trees, lay fallen over.

Betty somehow made it over piles of debris, over and under branches and straight to the jack. The walk was one that Betty would not remember making a year later, but somehow she got there, as simple as walking across an empty room. It was a walk she says was guided by a hand from above.

Mike was able to use the jack and relieve some of the pressure.

"If you guys can stand it, help is on the way," Mike said.

There was nothing else he could do until more help came.

Now that Jeanie knew help was on the way and now that she could breathe a little easier, she could concentrate on Eddie.

He was in pretty bad shape, how bad she couldn't tell.

They talked quietly, mostly small talk, trying to keep each other awake and alert.

"Remember the way Casey ran up to you and hugged you yesterday?" Jeanie asked, referring to their trip to the Leopold Park, where they met their grandson. When they arrived, Casey immediately stopped playing, ran to them and gave Eddie a hug. "Think good thoughts."