Debris & danger

Jeanie and Eddie Graham were trapped under their house, in their neighbor's driveway, 40 feet from where Jeanie felt the bathroom floorboards being sucked from underneath her feet.

She and Eddie were making small talk, trying to think good thoughts under the pile while waiting for rescuers to dig them out.

Darin Shell, then a Marble Hill police officer and assistant fire chief, was the first man the county's emergency management coordinator, Jim Bollinger, called to the destroyed Lake of the Hills subdivision.

A communications tower had been knocked out by the storm, so firefighters had to be called on the telephone.

Shell and Bollinger split up -- Bollinger went to ground zero at County Road 512 in his SUV; Shell went to the Lake of the Hills disaster area in his patrol car.

When Shell got to the lake's first entrance road, he discovered a problem. The road up to the subdivision, a gravel driveway a fifth of a mile long, was cut off by a 10-foot-high wall of trees.

Shell, flashlight in hand, started making his way to the Grahams. It was not a matter of climbing over the trees. It was a matter of climbing through them.

Not far away, on Highway 51, firefighter Jack Watt had just finished inspecting his property. A shed garage door was gone and contents had been sucked out, but everything seemed to be safe for his family. At that point, he turned from victim to firefighter.

Watt, armed with a Stihl chain saw, went to the scene and began cutting away trees on Highway FF. He wasn't there long before he got a call that injuries had been reported at the nearby Lake of the Hills subdivision.

He and two Black River Electric employees arrived at about the same time and began carving out a path between Highway PP and the spot where Jeanie and Eddie lay injured.

But removing the trees was not a simple task.

The trees were twisted, bent and broken in such a way that a wrong cut could relieve pressure and send a tree flying like it was launched from a catapult. Figuring out how to clear the road was like figuring out a math problem. It had to be solved in a calculated way or people would get hurt.

Before long, rescue workers showed up in full force. As many as 30 people showed up that night at the Lake of the Hills road entrance. Volunteer firefighters from all over Southeast Missouri arrived at the scene, but not all of the help that night came from trained individuals. Some folks donated their four-wheelers, others shined spotlights, others just gave an extra pair of eyes as the chain-saw brigade tried to work the puzzle, in the dark and in the rain.

The conversations between Jeanie, Eddie and the others who tried to keep them company changed back and forth from small talk to serious talk.

At one point, Jeanie told Betty Hastings, the Grahams' neighbor, to tell her sons that she loved them.

Eddie and Jeanie kept telling each other that the other one would be all right. And they prayed a lot. They didn't talk about their own pain.

Trapped under a mound of rubbish, Jeanie was hot. It was dark and she couldn't breathe well. She waited, and waited, and waited, while her husband's blood soaked her nightshirt.

Betty helped the Grahams pass the time by describing the overall devastation, and everyone tried not to think about how long it was taking for help to arrive.

When Watt's Stihl hummed its first tune, it was a heavenly melody. It was a sign that help was on the way, and it gave them something new to talk about.

"I hear the chain saws," Betty told them. "I see the flashlights. They're coming for you."

Sense of time is lost when people are buried under a house, but sometime after Mike Humes, the Grahams' neighbor, used the jack to relieve some pressure, Shell arrived. He quickly surveyed the scene, made sure the downed electric lines were not hot and began to work at removing the pile. More rescuers began to arrive.

They had no extrication equipment, but Eddie was in such serious shape that Shell and the others didn't think they could wait for the brigade to clear the path to get the equipment to the scene. They knew the mound was unstable and could collapse if they weren't careful. But time was wasting, and they didn't know how much time Eddie had left.

Meanwhile, two ambulance EMTs from Stoddard County were making their way through the trees to the Grahams, toting 12-pound jump bags -- containing backboards and medical supplies -- and tool-box sized trauma kits.

Shell and the other rescuers quickly, but cautiously, removed one chunk of trash after another.

While the men pulled away parts of the heap, Jeanie and Eddie felt the pressure switch back and forth from one body part to another. To get free, they would simply have to endure the pain.

Finally, the rescue trio lifted the wall up.

And there were Jeanie and Eddie, holding onto each other. Not even a tornado could tear them apart.

Jeanie felt the cool air swoop down over her body. She could see the night sky. She could breathe again.

A few people helped Jeanie around to where the Grahams' deck used to be, where it was flat. Somebody grabbed a torn quilt and wrapped it around her to keep her warm while the rescue workers tended to Eddie.

Because of Eddie's condition, they decided to try to keep him as still as possible. They scooted him onto a door they had found, to help support his back. Blood was spilling from his mouth, he had numerous cuts on his arms and legs and his chest hurt. It appeared that several bones were broken and protruding from his skin. They did what they could until more help arrived.

The two ambulance workers found Jeanie in surprisingly good shape. She had many cuts and bruises. There was a particularly nasty gash on her forehead, but there were no serious injuries.

The emergency personnel carefully placed Eddie on a backboard and stabilized his legs.

Jeanie and Eddie were finally getting medical attention. But Eddie needed to get to a hospital soon. And there didn't appear to be any way out.

The chain-saw brigade was making slow and steady progress at the Lake of the Hills entrance. Volunteers began showing up in twos and threes when Watt found out there were injuries at the lake. At that point, he was nowhere near the Grahams' place, so he and the two Black River Electric employees headed farther up the pile, closer to the victims, to clear out a spot for a helicopter landing zone.

He wanted to get as close to the victims as he could, but the watch was ticking, so he also looked for the pile of least resistance. He and the two electric employees found just the right spot.

By the time the helicopter arrived, there would be a place to land.

As the helicopter pilot, it was Don Stanton's job to monitor weather conditions when he was on duty at Arch Air Medical Services in Cape Girardeau.

Stanton heard that a tornado touched down near Marble Hill. When the call came in at 2:02 a.m. that their services might be needed, the storm had just passed over Cape Girardeau.

The wind was gusting at 40 knots at Cape Girardeau Regional Airport. Fifty knots is the maximum wind that the helicopter was designed for.

Ten minutes later, the request for a flight was confirmed, and the ARCH command center in St. Louis relayed the approximate coordinates of Lake of the Hills. Because of the severe weather, the helicopter had been placed in a hangar for protection. It took 15 minutes to prepare it for takeoff. At 2:27 a.m., Stanton and two paramedics began their turbulent flight to Marble Hill.

In a typical emergency, Stanton flies to the coordinates, looks for the red and blue lights and puts the bird down wherever there's a clear spot.

This was not a typical emergency.

When he approached the disaster scene, red and blue lights were flashing for miles, all the way from County Road 512, to FF to PP -- the tornado path was four miles long.

Firefighters and EMTs from Jackson, Marble Hill, Sedgewickville, Stoddard County, Wayne County, Cape Girardeau County, Bollinger County, Zalma, Wappapello, Advance, Leopold, Greenville and Piedmont responded to the call for aid. Lights, lights and more lights.

Communication on the ground was limited to one frequency because of the tower the tornado had knocked out.

Flight paramedic Pam Cissel was trying to relay communications to Stanton, but the chatter was constant and confusing. Dialogue was impossible.

Finally, someone spoke up on the radio.

"Hey everybody, shut up so we can get this helicopter down!"

Thank God, Cissel thought.

Watt, a former Navy helicopter pilot, was communicating with Cissel from the ground, waving a flashlight in each hand. Four-wheeler lights lit up the landing zone. Watt gave Cissel the Cliff Notes version of the scene -- power lines down in the lake, watch out for the bluff.

Stanton circled the lake two or three times, assessing the situation with the helicopter's powerful lights. The landing zone was clear but small. It would be the tightest landing of Stanton's career.

The preferred landing method is to stay high in the air, then drop the helicopter slowly. With debris everywhere, Stanton didn't have that option.

The landing zone was at the base of a cliff, and Stanton was afraid that if he took a normal vertical descent, the wind from the blades would knock debris from the top of the bluff into the landing zone or on top of a person. So he decided to drop down close to the lake, take a horizontal approach, hovering just above the lake.

Slowly, he lowered the helicopter down. He steadied it forward, heading toward the bluff.

Cissel looked out the back window.

"You've got a lot of mist back here," she said.

It was imperative that Stanton keep the helicopter moving forward. If he hovered in place, the mist would swarm the helicopter and visibility would be lost, just like a "whiteout" or "brownout" situation in snow or sand.

He kept the helicopter moving forward. The helicopter lights lit up the landing zone and, at 2:45 a.m., exactly two hours after the tornado struck Marble Hill, Stanton put the helicopter on the ground.

Just moments after the EMTs placed Eddie on the backboard, the chopping sound of helicopter blades resonated the valley. It was impeccable timing.

Everybody pitched in, helping Eddie to the helicopter. They had to carry him over trees, but there were enough people by that time to hand him over piles. Others held branches and limbs out of the way and used flashlights to illuminate the way.

He was conscious and talking but cold and pale.

At 2:58 a.m., Stanton took off and backed out the same way he came in.

Once Eddie was taken away to Southeast Missouri Hospital, rescue workers carried Jeanie down the driveway to the ambulance that waited.

Eddie stayed in the hospital for 32 days. The storm broke seven ribs. He had bitten a terrible gash on his tongue, and that's what was causing him to gurgle.

The places in his legs where it appeared that bones were protruding were actually wallboard fragments that the tornado had whipped through his skin. He did not break his legs.

There were a couple of times where it looked like Eddie wouldn't make it, but he pulled through.

Jeanie stayed in the hospital two nights, even though she insisted she was fine and didn't need to. She stayed with one of her sons in Cape Girardeau until Eddie got out of the hospital.

The morning after revealed the total scope of damage at Lake of the Hills, but things could have been much worse.

Much of Eddie and Jeanie's house had collapsed into the basement, and survival underneath that debris would have been impossible.

Betty's one-legged goose was standing where the cage used to be. All her critters survived, although some of her quail escaped and were not seen again. Her fish aquarium was the only glass in the house that didn't shatter.

And Boots, Jeanie's cat, even showed up again, though he wouldn't let anyone touch him for a couple weeks after the tornado.

Volunteers continued to help in the days and weeks that followed. The Red Cross came, Crader Distributing -- a distributor of Stihl chain saws -- allowed workers to help victims clean up on the clock.

The members of Mount Pleasant Baptist Church opened their doors as an emergency operations center and provided meals until the victims could get back on their feet.

The list of kind deeds and acts go on and on.

A year later, trees are still bent over and twisted in the woods of Lake of the Hills and along County Road 512.

Physical and emotional scars remain.

Jeanie and Eddie walk almost every day as part of a daily routine to get back to normal. Eddie sometimes walks two miles, but he's not back to full strength.

And nobody who experienced the tornado is the same person of a year ago.

Jeanie has experienced anger and guilt. Her life is a now little grayer than it used to be. It's frustrating when she cooks in the kitchen and needs something that she used to have but doesn't anymore.

Life will never be normal again, not really. Even Boots the cat, never comfortable in storms, is horrified by them today.

Betty found it difficult to deal with the tornado. Simple tasks, like paying bills, became difficult. She couldn't even write a check for months -- her mind wouldn't let her body execute the function.

Despite the lingering effects, everybody at Lake of the Hills survived that night.

And they lived to see the hummingbirds once again.

bmiller@semissourian.com

243-6635