The Springfield News-Leader from Springfield, Missouri • Page 4

4A January 13, 2008 FROM PAGE ONE SUNDAY NEWS-LEADER CLOSER LOOK 5Vt day storm that "wiped out their barn, blew it to pieces, there is just nothing left," said Garard. A second horse survived with mild injuries and the house was picked up and twisted, but didn't collapse, she said. Garard's husband is pastor at the Whites' church, Fair Grove Baptist. "We as a church truly believe that God had his hand on that home, because Ken felt the house lift and twist and felt it come back down," she said. More than 25 members of the church immediately came to help the Whites with the cleanup, Garard said.

"They were in shock at the damage, but they thanked God for keeping them all safe." 'It was so fast' CLOSER LOOK Survivors recall night of tornadoes NEWS-LEADER STAFF Like the ice storm that battered the Ozarks in 2007, the severe storms and tornadoes that struck late Monday and early Tuesday appear to be headed for the record books. Like that earlier bout of destruction, the Ozarks' most recent battle with Mother Nature has spawned thousands of stories from those who sometimes narrowly survived its passing. Over the past week, dozens of area residents have shared their experiences and near-misses with the News-Leader. Here are a few: 0 tjM- AMBER ARNOLD NEWS-LEADER Evan Biggers of Marshfield helps clean up Saturday at the Harringtons' home in Marshfield. The house was destroyed late Monday.

Neighbors help after storm close calls with tornado "If they would have been in the outer room, it probably would have been a different deal," he said. Planning for future When Terry Whittington, 31, his wife and five children returned v- Families had By Brittany Carlson NEWS-LEADER After a tornado plowed down Quail Creek Drive in Marshfield, demolishing the home of Brad and Tiffany Harrington, they and other residents relied on each other for help. Sudden strike Curtis Crosser, 49, had just sat down to watch a Monday night football game when the storm hit. "All of the sudden, I heard the wind pick up and the rain really started to hit hard," Crosser Crosser "(When I) unlocked the front door, it hit me in the chest and started pushing me backwards." He shouted to his son and wife to get in the utility room, where there are no windows. Minutes later, Crosser said it felt like it was all over, so he went outside.

Down the road, a neighbor yelled, "Tiffany's house is gone." "Gone, you mean all gone?" Crosser remembers asking. "There's nothing left," he said. LUCKY BY 150 YARDS Sheila Speakes, 47, heard a noise like a freight train and told her husband and son to get away from the back of the house. "It was here and over with be i' at After riding out Monday's twister in a basement closet, rural Strafford resident Lenae Spoering frantically tried to reach her neighbor by phone, with no success. "I came running out of the house and went towards their house," Spoering recalled.

"Their propane tank was spewing gas. "I was on the phone with 911 when I turned around and saw our house. I was screaming lady, our house is The tornado ripped away the top two stories of their three-story house. Spoering's husband, Zach, remembers his ears popping as he, his wife and 15-year-old stepson Cole headed to the basement closet. "It was loud and stuff was flying," he said.

"The pressure in my ears was unreal. It was so fast and then it was over." He said the concrete foundation might be the only part that's salvageable. When they rebuild, they plan to put in a real tornado shelter. "This is hard to take," he said. "We did all the interior finish work ourselves." Measuring damage Tuesday morning, Trey Vance made a video recording of the damage to his home at 521 Cottage Place in Republic.

He was at home with his two children, ages 2 and 4, when the first rounds of the storm hit. He had a list of damages. "It looks like we lost about three-quarters of the shingles," he said. "The trees from across the street in the play area blew into my garage door, and that's why the door is all bent in. It pulled the lights off the side of the house, it pulled out a window on the back." Inside the house, gallons of water started filling light fixtures.

Hardwood floors were flooded and are now buckling. Vance said his wife was worried about wearing the clothes in her closet because when a window in the closet broke, shards of glass were embedded throughout. One of the biggest mysteries was what happened to a huge wooden playset that was in the Vances' yard. "I don't know where it is," said Vance. "It is gone." Fickle funnel "There's some damage, but not too much structural damage to the trailer," Carrie Hen-son says of the shape of her Oakland mobile home after a tornado slammed into it.

"Some of the concrete pillars need to be fixed, and the underpinnings." Insurance adjusters have already been out and she and husband, Tim, should be back in the home soon, Henson said. She laughs about the whims of a 150-mph funnel that tore into her home and did nothing but whip the rug off her parents' porch nearby. "It only gets their rug, and I didn't have a place to live!" But enough about that. That's the impression Henson gives about the "train" she and her parents heard as they hunkered in the basement of the older couple's house down the road. Now it's on to the good that's come from it.

"We've had blessing after blessing, lots of people coming by. And God spared our little building," she says of her church nearby, where winds whipped around the church and tore out a big tree, crunched part of a fence and blew the roof off an outbuilding. "I'm so thankful for my family and friends." f. V' AMBER ARNOLD NEWS-LEADER Kathryn Eaton sits in the storm shelter in her garage. Sharing a shelter When Kathryn Eaton moved back from California in 2005, one of the first things she did was buy a storm shelter for her garage.

"I wouldn't live in Missouri without one," Eaton said of the six-foot-high steel shelter, which measures just 6 feet wide and 4 feet deep. Eaton said her father taught her to be prepared, and her foresight paid off Monday night. As a tornado struck Eaton's home and others in The Cottages subdivision in Republic, the shelter kept her and several neighbors safe from harm. "I was real thankful I had that thing," she said. "At one time, there were seven of us in there." Initially, Eaton was joined by her neighbor, Crystal Tyson, and Tyson's two children, ages 4 and 7.

"We had blankets -the little kids were cold," Eaton said. She'd stocked food in the shelter, as well. "No one had eaten, so we had graham crackers for dinner." They could hear as the storm caved in Eaton's garage door, shattered windows and blew holes in the roof. "It put a 2-by-6 through the (garage) wall, then punched right through a trash can," she said. "The pressure was awful.

It hurt your ears." When a second storm closed in on the damaged neighborhood, they crowded in the shelter again, this time joined by Tyson's husband who'd dashed into a bathroom as the storm tore away chunks of the Tysons' home and Eaton's son and daughter-in-law. Eaton said the storm helped make up her mind about moving somewhere with "less exciting" weather. "I've been through earthquakes, and I'll take 'em over this," she said, laughing. "This is too much. Between the ice and the tornado it's like dodging bullets all the time." She'll miss the tight-knit neighborhood, however.

"It's a good, good place to live, with good neighbors," Eaton said, adding that a man down the street whose home was undamaged patched her windows Monday night. "They're all younger kids, except me and one other lady. They watch us like we're their grandmothers." A close house call As the storm was wreaking havoc on their house, destroying their barn and killing one of their horses, Ken White and his daughter Lauren were huddled in the downstairs bathroom at their Strafford home. "They heard the storm and took shelter in the downstairs bathroom," said family friend Sue Garard, "and it was so sweet; Ken put his body over his daughter's to protect her." While Ken White's wife Diane was in Springfield, dad and daughter, 18, rode out the Mon- say damage is spread throughout Webster County. By Dirk VanderHart It happened in seconds, by all accounts.

Tiffany and Steven Harrington had been preparing for the possible storms Monday evening, unsure whether reported tornadoes in the area might come knocking. The mother and son decided to stow their valuables, just in case. But then it got loud the kind of loud that shakes your insides. "Kind of like when a train blows its horn right in front of you," said Steven Harrington, 16. "You feel it." And then the Marshfield home simply disappeared like some sinister magic trick.

When the Harringtons bloodied and tossed hundreds of feet by the winds were able to gather themselves, they realized nothing was left. No toilet, shower stall, couch. Not a single wall of the house at 39 Quail Creek Drive remained. Their home of seven years had become litter strewn over adjacent properties, open to the wind and rain. "It literally exploded.

Poof." said Tiffany's husband, Brian Harrington. He was in Chicago on business when the storm hit, but was baffled at what he found on his return. "I expected to see something. It was all gone." VOLUNTEERS NEEDED The Harringtons' predicament is dramatic, but not out of step with scenarios that played out throughout Webster County and elsewhere in southwest Missouri on Monday and Tuesday. A string of severe storms that swept through the region caused millions in property damage and created hardships for many in the area.

To help mend some of the damage, teams' of volunteers moved through Webster County on Saturday, handing out water and supplies and cleaning up storm refuse. "Every day we hear about more and more damage," said Deana Fishel, spokeswoman for the Webster County Emergency Management Agency. "It went from a concentrated area to county-wide." Roughly 75 volunteers signed up for cleanup duty with the emergency agency Saturday, forming 11 groups that traveled to different sites. Those numbers complemented church groups and other organizations that also were working to improve the area, Fishel said. A group of Marines was expected to arrive from Fort Leonard Wood in the late afternoon.

But, though the support is needed, it will take much more than one day of labor to get Webster County back to normal. "There's so much damage, I don't think we can get to it all today," Fishel said Saturday. So the county is asking that area residents volunteer their time, strength and money to improving the region. The county's emergency fore you had time to do anything," she said. The tornado tore the family's above-ground pool, destroyed a shed and ripped the sliding screen off the back deck.

Inside the home, only water damage occurred. "We just caught the back end," Sheila Speakes said Saturday as she shook out washed laundry for the Harringtons on her front porch. "We're lucky by about 150 yards." INJURIES SUFFERED Milo and Wilma Duke were In the kitchen of their mobile home when the tornado lifted up an addition to the back of their trailer, flipped it and dropped it over their heads. "Dad was standing at the kitchen table (and) felt the whole place shake," said their son, Dale Duke, 51, who was burning debris behind their home Saturday. "Mom was in the living room area (when) the window blew in on her." Wilma Duke suffered head lacerations and received three units of blood when she arrived at Cox South hospital later that night.

The Dukes, who are in their 80s, live across the main road from the Harringtons. Dale Duke attributed his parents' survival to the fact that they were in the main trailer. 1 AMBER ARNOLD NEWS-LEADER help its Missouri counterpart. "After the storms, it was neighbor helping neighbor," Fishel said. "Now our neighborhood has become Missouri." Helping Harringtons For the Harringtons, at least, there's still a lot of "neighbor helping neighbor" taking place.

The morning after the storm, the family's neighbors began picking through the extensive refuse, searching for items that might be salvageable. That effort continued Saturday, as area volunteers joined in the cleanup. From an adjacent field, more D. Duke home from taking shelter in a neighbor's basement, he found a post jutting out of his daughter's bedroom, part of a shed from that mnHim- Whittinqton neighbor's yard. Before the storm, "Out of the window, we could see hail," he said.

"A couple seconds later, it was all quiet. It was only here for like 30 seconds." The tornado took off parts of Whittington's roof and wrenched the doors off his workshop. Whittington helped the Harringtons in their cleanup efforts and said he was amazed by what he didn't see: a tub, refrigerator or cabinets. Those had all been splintered. "I found a rifle, at least 100 years old, broken in two out by the lagoon," he said.

Whittington plans to install a storm shelter under his garage and put all of his family photos on a disc in a fire-proof box. "You don't really realize the devastation until it's that close to you," Whittington said. Want to help? The Webster County Emergency Management Agency is asking for volunteers and monetary donations (which are tax-deductible) to help those affected by the recent tornados. To find out how to help, call the agency at 859-7959. than 20 helpers returned to the house's former foundation with the Harringtons' old pos-sessions' a ham that had been in the garage refrigerator, the front door, clocks, mattresses.

Some of the trash was burned, some was thrown away, some was salvageable. "I didn't realize it was this bad," said volunteer Tyler Fishel, a Marshfield resident and stepson of Deana Fishel. "I see I was lucky." Ozark resident Barb Beck volunteered with her husband Saturday "just to get out in the field," she said. "We're able-bodied. We can help." From the cement platform that used to be their home, the Harringtons picked through their few remaining possessions.

Tiffany Harrington who suffered three cracked ribs, a punctured lung and a nasty gash to the head when the storm threw her helped, too, though still in pain. "I can't stand not to help," she said. "I knew every stitch of that house." The family still has no idea what the future will bring. They've yet to work out with their insurance company how much they may receive for their losses, and are staying at a hotel for the time being. "There's still a lot unresolved," said Brian Harrington.

"We haven't really looked that far into the future. "We're taking it day by day." Barb Beck of Ozark was one of many volunteers helping out Saturday at the Harringtons' home in Marshfield. agency has enough water, food and supplies to help families, but lacks the manpower and finances to sustain them in the long term. County officials are now waiting to see whether the region will be labeled a disaster area. Federal and state funds will be made available if that distinction is made.

"We don't count on aid until aid has been declared," Fishel said. "Right now, we're waiting on the declaration." Mostly, though, the situation has been hopeful. Fishel said she's been inundated with offers assistance from organizations all over the region. There has even been a promise from the city of Marshfield, to.