Hello friends, It has now been two months since the tornado hit. For those of you brand new to this mailing list, my house was destroyed by the EF5 tornado that struck Joplin on May 22nd. There is talk of the weather folks actually inventing a new category, EF6, since most of them seem to agree that there has never been a tornado this bad, anywhere.
There are still many hundreds of half-destroyed buildings all over town, but a great deal of the rubble, maybe 50%, has now been cleared away. A century ago, mining was the main industry in this part of the country, and just a few miles from town are enormous empty fields covered with what locals call the chat piles (leftover useless gravel). Some of these places have been designated dump sites, so there is no worry about running out of room to put the rubble. Certain streets in town have been designated for dump truck traffic, but traffic is still very congested in many parts of town. Also all over town are thousands of damaged trees that are still standing, but all of the branches and bark were stripped away. It's kind of an eerie sight, and most of the trees will probably die, but hopefully not all of them. Trees are something most people take for granted, but you sure miss them when all of a sudden they're all gone. The place where our house sat has now been cleared away, it's just a patch of dirt now. The old garage (not attached) received only minor damage; it has been repaired, and I intend to use it for shop space. We have bought a new house in another part of town, and we will move in in a few weeks. This week our insurance started shipping us stuff to replace the items we lost, so every day I get to open a bunch of boxes. Like Opie once said, it's like getting an extra Christmas! I packed up a bunch of my Mayberry stuff and shipped it to TAGSRWC, who will shortly be offering the items for sale to raise funds for other Joplin tornado victims. There are lots of the TAGS trading cards from about 20 years ago, several unopened TAGS board games, and a pair of the Andy and Barney nodder statues (very hard to find). Even if you're not just dying to own any of those items, please consider purchasing something anyway, because the money will go to a good cause. Later I will put some additional Mayberry items up on eBay, once we get all of the boxes unpacked. 10-4, Paul Mulik _______________________________________________ WBMUTBB mailing list [email protected] http://www.mayberry.com/tagsrwc/wbmutbb/
