Post-Storm Joplin: Swimming is One of the Few Regularities

Feature by Tyler Remmel

JOPLIN, Missouri, June 7. JOPLIN has risen to unfortunate prominence in recent weeks, the latest tragic tale of Mother Nature's fury this year.

The pictures we've seen on national news are eerie, conveying scenes of a seemingly post-apocalyptic world. But to residents of Joplin, the May 22 storm was a horrifying reality, and will be one that is not easily forgotten (more likely, not forgotten at all).

The massive tornado cut a path six miles long and half-a-mile wide straight through the city of 50,000. Twisted metal, glass shards, split wood and overturned cars littered that strip, and the images show a stark landscape of flattened buildings.

St. John's Regional Medical Center is a striking anomaly, one of the only buildings left standing in the twister's path. Reports have some doctors claiming, even in that case, that the hospital nearly imploded as a result of the high winds. Medical records and X-rays have been found as far as 60 miles away from the city. The former patients have been dispersed into hospitals in an even larger radius.

But, the Webb City High School pool is still where it always has been, seven miles northeast of Joplin. And its home club team, the Jasper County Killer Whales, is still in the water.

"We're just going with the flow, letting people get their lives back on track," said Shawn Klosterman, the C.O.O of JCKW and the aquatics director at the Webb City School District.

JCKW is an all-area club, so about half of its members live in Joplin.

A large number of swimmers and their families have been helping their community clean up. Even Klosterman has missed two days of work helping his mother-in-law clean debris and board up windows (and his wife is volunteering as a Red Cross crisis counselor). The team understands the need to volunteer, and a rigid attendance policy is anything but appropriate right now.

"We aren't expecting anything to be normal yet," Klosterman said.

An expectation of normality would be outrageous. To say that the club has been affected by the storm would be a gross understatement. For some swimmers and their families, the storm literally hit home.

Two former JCKW swimmers lost their homes in the storm, as well as one current swimmer, Michelle Barchak.

"We were in the basement when the storm hit," she said.

She and her family huddled under a workbench while the storm passed. Initially, a window in the basement blew out, throwing glass all around. When the wind started blowing in, the air pressure rose, and Michelle said it hurt her ears. The temperature rose, and she heard a roaring noise. But, she says even though it seemed like forever, the storm only lasted about a minute. When it was over, her father found them all shoes so they could walk out of the house over the broken glass.

"Where we were was the only place in the basement that wasn't permeated with glass," she said. "We were lucky."

As it turns out, luck in the midst of a massive tornado has a different meaning than luck during a more normal time.

When they made it upstairs, they saw that the neighbors' homes had literally been ripped from their foundations. Consequently, they were leaking natural gas. Hurrying to avoid a secondary tragedy, Michelle and her family ran to her grandmother's house a few blocks away, returning later to pick up important items like computers.

Her first worry was for her friends. Fortunately, while some also lost their homes, and even her high school was destroyed, everyone close to her was safe when all was said and done.

"Working on online classes…and going to swim practice has really helped me keep a normal life [after the storm]," she said. "Other than being around the wreckage, it's really not that much of a change."

Yes, that's right. She and her friends still hang out regularly, and even though she's staying at someone else's house, Michelle insists that her life hasn't changed much.

The tornado hit on a Sunday, and Michelle was back in the water by Thursday. Her family was able to borrow a vehicle right away from her father's work, and she's been able to make it to almost every practice since.

With the loss of her home, though, so too came the destruction of her swimming equipment. No matter, her teammates helped her out. The car her family is driving now has also been borrowed from a teammate.

The defining spirit in the aftermath is that sense of teamwork that has grown. Everyone is helping everyone else who needs it.

"A few of my friends whose homes weren't damaged have been helping us almost every day," Michelle said.

The spirit of teamwork extends beyond JCKW to the entire swimming community, though. "There was an immediate outpouring of support from swim teams," said Klosterman.

The night of the storm, he already had received emails from local teams checking to make sure he was okay.

"They were ready to come to town and bring swimsuits and goggles for the kids to get us on our feet," he said.

Interestingly, the most interesting caveat of the storm is that Klosterman feels like the residents of Joplin were the last ones to realize how bad the storm actually was.

"It almost seems like Joplin…was finding out about it after everyone else was [nationally]," he said.

For Klosterman, who was not in the immediate path of the storm when it hit, the damage wasn't visually apparent. With local media outlets shut down as a result of the storm, it became a national headline before the local media were even back on their own feet.

"It was kind of a weird situation," Klosterman said.

Different methods of support have come in from as far away as Wisconsin, where one woman emailed Klosterman saying that her club was doing a swim-a-thon for JCKW families.

At a meet in Bentonville, Mo., $2,100 was raised to help swimming families who lost their homes. As a matter of fact, at that Bentonville meet, other teams' coaches volunteered to act as a coach for the JCKW kids who were at the meet without a coach. You see, in the weeks prior to the tornado, the head coach at JCKW had moved on to another position, and Klosterman has stepped up to solve the many problems that have quickly sprung up.

If the club deals with the storm as well as the town has, it will be just fine.

"[After the storm] everyone had that look on their face like they've seen a ghost," Klosterman said. "Or like they are a ghost."

Obviously, there was that initial sense of shock, but he contributes the fact that everyone has been so willing to help everyone else to the reason that the cleanup is coming around so quickly. It's like everyone is in fighting mode trying to get Joplin back to normal.

"Everyone just felt like they couldn't do enough to help," he said. "Every conversation for at least a week [following the storm] started with, ‘Is your family okay? What can I do to help?'"

Just as amazing as the stories of help are some of the stories of survival. People have come out of extraordinary circumstances, like hiding in a different spot than they usually would, and surviving only because that particular closet was the one part of their home left standing. The hundreds of people in St. John's hospital when the storm hit, including Klosterman's assistant, Teresa Reeder, managed to survive by hiding in the hallway.

She was on the seventh floor at the time.

"Afterwards, everyone just kind of wondered what to do next," she said. "We all kind of worked together."

They systematically carried all the patients in beds down the stairwells to buses that took patients to other regional hospitals. Again, the theme was teamwork, with everyone making their first priority to make sure that everyone else was safe and accounted for.

In the coming weeks, surely the national media will be keeping tabs on the Joplin cleanup. The community will never really return to normal though, at least not the same normal that existed before the storm.

Joplin will still need enormous help along the way, and so will JCKW. Even though the initial outreach has been great, the non-local volunteers who have come in droves with disappear almost as quickly as they came, and Joplin will still have more cleaning up to do. If you'd like to help JCKW or Joplin, email Shawn Klosterman at jckw@prodigy.net.

Since JCKW is a non-profit organization, all checks made to the club are tax-deductible. They have set up a separate bank account to accommodate the donations, and that money will be used to help families within the team that have been affected by the tornado to get back on their feet. Excess donations will be forwarded to the general Red Cross fund for Joplin aid.

"Six months from now, people are still going to be needing help," said Klosterman. "And we need to make sure that they're getting it."

Name*

Email*

Welcome to our community. We invite you to join our discussion. Our community guidelines are simple: be respectful and constructive, keep on topic, and support your fellow commenters. Commenting signifies that you agree to our Terms of Use