Amid grief, Pingree police chief finds a flood of human kindness in Joplin
BY DAVE GATHMAN dgathman@stmedianetwork.com June 14, 2011 7:37PM
Police Chief Carol Lussky and her dog Jake at the Pingree Grove Police Department. Lussky and Jake recently were down in Joplin Missouri searching for victims after the tornado disaster. June 13, 2011 | Michael Smart~Sun-Times Media
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Updated: September 29, 2011 12:53AM
PINGREE GROVE — When Police Chief Carol Lussky arrived in Joplin, Mo., four days after the tornado hit that city, she found devastation and pain magnitudes above anything she had ever witnessed in her 51 years of life and 30 years of police work.
But even stronger than that, she says, was the feeling of how generous and helpful people can be when they see a neighbor in distress.
“What a great community — a great country,” she said in an interview this week following her return from Joplin with one of her search and rescue dogs. “We really saw people helping people. There were a lot of churches involved, bringing in volunteers from miles away to help go through the rubble, and setting up tables on the corner, where victims and volunteers could get bottled water. Restaurants sent trucks loaded with food into the wrecked neighborhoods.”
For 15 years, Lussky has been a member of the Illinois-Wisconsin Search and Rescue Dogs organization, whose members own dogs that have been trained to search for missing people, alive or dead. During those years, she says, she and her three dogs have searched for drowning victims from aboard boats, have tracked down Alzheimer’s patients who wandered away from home and have searched woods for people who may have been kidnapped. Club members respond to calls from police and fire departments throughout northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin.
But when that giant storm slammed through Joplin at 5:41 p.m. on Sunday evening, May 22, and hundreds of people remained missing, possibly under thousands of collapsed buildings, a call went out for rescue-dog teams from all over the Midwest.
So Lussky got permission from village President Greg Marston to take some vacation time, climbed into her Chevy Astrovan with a 10-year-old, 85-pound German shepherd named Jake, and began the 550-mile drive to the southwest corner of Missouri.
Widespread devastation
“The media didn’t really show how enormous an area was affected,” Lussky said. “Watching TV, you get the impression the storm hit mainly one spot around the hospital. But the damage covered an area three-quarters of a mile wide and 5 miles long. That whole area looked like a bomb had gone off. You could see tree trunks but no leaves and very few branches. Smashed cars were everywhere. One third of the city was destroyed.”
But the storm was unpredictable and capricious, too, she said. In the middle of one collapsed house, a dining room table remained untouched, still set with dishes for a Sunday dinner that would never be served. A mobile home — a species of shelter that’s notoriously vulnerable to tornado damage — sat untouched while all around it, every other structure had been leveled.
Just navigating around in such a zone required Herculean effort.
“When we arrived, they had gotten the streets cleared out enough to get through. But the street signs had all been blown away, and if you didn’t know what street you were on, you couldn’t do any kind of an organized search. So at each corner the emergency management people had put up new signs, sort of like garage-sale signs, showing what street it was.”
“We had expected to have to stay in a tent city or to sleep in our cars. But Missouri Southern State University in Joplin had just sent its students home for the summer, so they put us up in college dorm rooms.”
Emergency officials painted an X on each damaged building, with notations at different parts of the X indicating what task force had checked it and when, whether any fatalities had been found inside and what kind of special hazards, such as leaking gas or hazardous materials, existed inside.
Lussky said dogs like Jake are trained for two kinds of searching. They can look for a specific missing individual, such as a lost Alzheimer’s patient, by smelling some of the person’s clothes, then following the trail of his particular scent. Or their super noses can smell wrecked buildings for indications of either a live human or a dead body trapped underneath.
“They can even find a body underwater by leaning out over the bow of a Zodiac boat as it cruises along a river or pond,” she said.
Search for victims
Their first assignment was to find a man who had been living in a Winnebago recreational vehicle in the driveway outside a home. Now the house was wrecked, the Winnebago had disappeared and the neighbors were concerned.
Lussky and another Illinois dog handler named Melinda had their dogs smell the home debris, then all the other debris nearby in an expanding circle. Finally, at the bottom of a hill behind the home, in a tangle of brush, they found the smashed remnants of part of the Winnebago. But there was no body inside.
“While Jake was working, we got word that the missing man had been found quite awhile before and he was in a hospital.”
When they were called two or three days after the storm, she said, 750 people were listed as missing. When they arrived two days after that, the list had shrunk to 250. Next day it fell to 90. And when the number hit zero a week after the storm, she and Jake got the all-clear to go home.
She said most of those missing were OK and had gone to stay with friends or relatives, “but in the chaos, a neighbor or relative would say, ‘My friend’s home is destroyed and I don’t know where he is.’”
She said the final death toll came to 139, with 800 homes and 500 businesses destroyed.
The second assignment for Lussky and Jake was to check out a collapsed home where humans had smelled what they thought might be decomposing bodies. But after dogs searched and people pulled the wreckage apart, no one was found inside.
The next day, a young man who had been sucked out of a car through its moon roof was found dead in a pond. “The concern began that there might be other victims underwater,” Lussky said. So the rest of their trip was spent cruising ponds in a boat, with Jake leaning out over the bow, smelling for the odors of death. They found no one.
“To the dogs, this is all a fun game,” Lussky said. “If the search had gone on like that any longer, we would have planted some live people under wreckage for them to find” to keep up the dogs’ morale.
Disaster preparedness
But Lussky said the band of animal lovers found some beasts they didn’t love. While they were searching the ponds, they saw a deadly water moccasin swimming past. In general, however, she was struck by how few pets or wild animals were visible anywhere, as if all had been killed or scared away. “We heard that 400 dogs and cats were put into animal shelters, waiting to be reunited with their owners — if they’re still alive.”
Any cop knows that evil also lurks within the human soul. Lussky said that when she saw a college student walk into a dorm carrying a fishing pole and a golf bag, “at first I just thought that it was interesting that even in these circumstances, a kid could be interested in stuff like that. Then I realized he had probably stolen them from the wrecked sporting-goods store down the street. The price tags were still attached.”
But she said there were very few reports of looting. In Ozarks style, some homeowners had scrawled messages on the sides of their damaged homes warning that any looter would be met with the point of a gun. Lussky said police enforced a 9 p.m. curfew in the damaged areas, and there were no streetlights operating there anyway.
Though she took the trip on unpaid vacation time, Lussky said she brought back some new ideas about how to plan for possible similar disasters that could hit the Pingree Grove area.
Pingree Grove village leaders and the Pingree Grove & Countryside Fire Protection District already have held meetings with their counterparts in Hampshire to do such planning.
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