Copyright 2006 St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Inc.
By THERESA TIGHE
St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Missouri)
On the day after a tornado whipped through Caruthersville, Mo., and wiped out half the town, a contingent of firefighters, paramedics and search-and-rescue dogs from the St. Louis area arrived to help.
Caruthersville, a town of about 6,700, is about 200 miles south of St. Louis. The tornado hit Sunday. No one was killed. About 50 firefighters from St. Louis County and Jefferson, Franklin and St. Charles counties went.
Chief Gregory Brown of the Eureka Fire Protection District said, “We went down there to help as a part of Missouri’s mutual aid system. That’s the way it would work if we needed resources.”
Brown praised the local emergency services crews. He described the scene in Caruthersville as “complete and total devastation. Some search-and-rescue folks who had been in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina said the damage in Caruthersville was every bit as bad as the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans.”
He said he carried a mental picture of a big industrial building where cotton was refined. The roof and the sides were torn off, and inside were many bales of cotton.
“The water tower next to the building was mangled and on its side,” Brown said.
The water tower also stuck in the mind of Firefighter Tom Frasca of the Mehlville Fire Protection District. It led his litany of the damage and destruction he saw.
He said, “We saw the collapsed and twisted water tower, a demolished school, cars thrown about, people’s belongings everywhere.
“When it came into town, the tornado sucked up mud from newly plowed fields and threw it all over town. Everything had mud all over it.”
Frasca’s job was going from home to home on the south end of town. It was a second search, and the searchers, who expected anything, found no one injured or trapped.
Frasca said that operations like the one in Caruthersville made him proud to be a firefighter. Frasca also said that mutual aid was a help to the people at home.
“Mehlville is in South County, and South County isn’t immune to events like the one that happened in Caruthersville,” he said.
Firefighter and paramedic Brian Towsley of Monarch Fire District and his German shepherd, Rebel, went as part of a four-person and four-dog team. Towsley said they had searched fields and buildings that had been damaged. He said collapsed buildings had voids into which people couldn’t see. Dogs can smell into the voids. The dog will become alert if it smells a human. That saves rescuers time. If there is no one in a void, they don’t have to cut into it. Sometimes they would have had to cut through concrete.
Towsley said watching the dogs at work also seemed to help the victims.
He said, “People who were so devastated by the loss of their home that they seemed to be unable to register an emotion would smile when they saw Rebel. Some would wave.”