![]() That’s when they discovered the cut that inched its way across nearly half of her left thigh was bone-deep. With all the emergency rooms full, Huddleston found herself waiting in the hallway until hospital staff was able to start picking debris out of Huddleston’s leg. With Huddleston fading in and out of consciousness, nurses put her on a gurney in the middle of the street and hooked her up to an IV until they were able to load her into the bed of a pickup truck and send her to Freeman Health System hospital. ![]() With their car totaled, the family piled into another vehicle and sped to Mercy Hospital, but that too had been destroyed. “That’s when we realized my leg was bleeding really badly, and I couldn’t move it,” Huddleston says. ![]() Then, just as suddenly as the storm had scooped them up, it deposited them back on the ground five blocks away. Sucked up into the storm, the car’s windows busted out, and debris engulfed the family. “It felt like the start of a roller coaster when you’re jerked up and then you’re off,” Huddleston says. Huddleston and her family drove directly into the tornado. The family was just a few blocks from their house when the sky turned black, and it looked as if they were about to drive into a wall of rain. On the afternoon of May 22, 2011, Huddleston and her family were at graduation when they heard the tornado sirens going off and decided to head home. For Huddleston, it’s the scar etched across her left thigh that reminds her just how lucky she was. Homes have been rebuilt, new businesses have popped up and trees are blooming, but still, scars remain. Not surprisingly, it has taken Joplin a long time to recover, but slowly the city has managed to pull itself from the rubble. The tornado left its mark not only in Joplin, but in the record books as the seventh deadliest tornado in U.S. Some 7,500 residential homes were flattened, and 161 people died in the storm. ![]() It was a devastating distance that tore 25,000 trees from the ground and left 3 million cubic yards of debris behind. At its peak, the tornado spread to be three-quarters-of-a-mile wide. She didn’t know that would be the last time she’d ever see her childhood home.įive years have passed since the EF-5 tornado ripped through Joplin, leaving behind it a wake of destruction totaling more than $2 billion in damages. When she walked out the front door, she turned back toward the house thinking she had forgotten something. On May 22, 2011, 13-year-old Emily Huddleston woke up like any other day. ![]()
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