![]() He, too, had used his 190-pound frame as armor, covering two nurses protecting a patient in the surgery recovery room. He wondered if that eerie creaking signaled the building’s collapse. Terry Burns, a surgical technician, had the same question. ![]() “She kept looking at me like, ‘Are we going to be OK?'” Hernandez recalls. The two nurses covered their elderly stroke patient with a sheet and draped their bodies over her while the woman’s daughter watched, her face frozen with fear. “Do you feel that?” she asked another nurse. The ground shook, a freight-train-like roar rumbled through the building and Hernandez felt all the air being sucked out of the emergency room. A generator kicked in, but only for a second. Their building would crumble around them, but their hospital would survive. Then on May 22, 2011, one of America’s worst tornadoes in half a century took dead aim at St. The hospital had always been there for the victims of calamity. John’s Regional Medical Center hospital in Joplin, Mo., a day after a powerful tornado destroyed much of the city. In this photo, vehicles and other debris lie near the damaged St. Tracy Hernandez had heard plenty of tornado warnings in 30 years of nursing. “Execute Condition Gray,” she announced on the public address system. There was tension in the woman’s voice, almost a sense of foreboding. Or for the nurses who shielded patients with their own bodies, pumped air into the lungs of those struggling to breathe, and jumped into pickup trucks to keep people alive. Not for the doctors who toiled in dust and darkness in the building’s final hours, scrambling to remove glass from the wounded, insert IVs and carry the sick to safety. Its ghostly, nine-story shell looked like the remnants of a nuclear blast. The building groaned in agony.Īnd when it was over, this hospital whose roots here date back to the 1890s was wounded - mortally, it seemed. John’s Regional Medical Center, barreling through halls, gnawing at walls, ripping open ceilings. One of America’s worst tornadoes in half a century took dead aim at St. On that day in late May, a black-and-green monster swooped in, its shoulders nearly a mile wide, its savagery unimaginable. Until one spring afternoon when that all changed. It was always a haven - never a victim, itself. It had saved lives, healed the desperately sick, patched up the bruised and bloodied and made them whole again. ? The hospital had always been there for the victims of calamity.
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