"Just imagine the building in those first few weeks," says Thurston. The adjusters' early days at the site were spent rummaging through the wreckage, making notes of the debris. It turned out to be the embarkation of an 18-month journey, involving investigation, discovery, calculation and debate. Soon after the event, FM Global claims adjusters Mike Perkins, Mike Smith and Dominic Thurston were dispatched to the location. "We had been under the impression we were prepared for just about anything, but we clearly weren't." "We spent the first few days in awe of all the destruction," he says. John Farnen, who leads the planning and design of Mercy Hospital facilities, was also among the first to show up at the site. The building itself had become nothing more than a massive container for destroyed contents. Ceilings were caved in, pipes were snapped, windows shattered, mattresses blown out of windows. Inside the 341-bed hospital, all hell had broken loose. "When I first got out of the car," Hunter recalls, "I looked around and everything was flattened. "I could see one window actually had a mattress in it and my thought was, I don't know that anyone in there has survived." "I pulled up on a hillside above the hospital and I could see that virtually every window was out," says Pulsipher, who arrived early enough to evacuate the remaining patients from the facility. President of Mercy Hospital Joplin Gary Pulsipher and Chief Financial Officer Shelly Hunter were among the first to arrive on the scene after the tornado passed. Unfortunately, and as seems to be the case so often, it took an almost apocalyptic event to engender real change. It is also, behind its attractive veneer and statuesque setting, a brilliant example of how hospital construction can fight back against the ferocity of nature, and how tornado belt facilities should be-and need to be-built in order to withstand today's extreme weather events. The new hospital, located three miles from the original site, is a fortress atop a gentle green and rolling hill. Today, the story of Joplin and the new hospital is about resilience. The town of Joplin is now rebuilt, and a centerpiece of that reconstruction is the new Mercy Hospital Joplin, a state-of-the-art, built-for-anything facility that is as strong and storm-hardened as it is beautiful. What started out as a cautionary tale of devastation and destruction has become one of revival and rebirth. The event took a total of 162 lives-including some at the hospital-injured hundreds, and temporarily wiped the region off the map. In the end, the tornado became one of the deadliest in U.S. But it was long enough to rumple a vibrant community building into ruins. The nine-story hospital withstood the brutality of the tornado for less than a minute. It's a harrowing narrative that serves as a reminder of the awesome power possessed by nature.īack in 2011, an EF5 tornado, actually a convergence of three separate tornados, and packing the powerful punch of 200-mph (322-kph) winds, cut a mile-wide (1.6 km), 13-mile (21-km) long, path of destruction through the Missouri town. John's hospital is one that is by now etched deeply into our subconscious. Five years later, what has taken its place is the new Mercy Hospital Joplin, a dazzling facility that symbolizes a life-affirming story of revitalization and rebirth. On what began as a sunny Sunday in May, one of the most powerful tornados ever recorded raged through Joplin, Missouri, disfiguring the landscape and destroying, among hundreds of buildings, St.
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