Joplin Tornado, May 2011

Hey, everyone. I don't have a lot of time to spare but I wanted to let everyone know that my family and I are fine. Our house was not destroyed or damaged in the tornado. Many others were less fortunate. Please remember them in your thoughts, prayers, or however you do those things. It has been a very stressful, tragic, and sometimes frightening experience. Joplin has been ripped literally in half by the storm, but the entire community (and much of the state) has come together to help those who lost everything. I'll talk more about this later, but here are some of the photos of the damage. This is only a fraction of the devastation, and it's important to note that Joplin is known for being a heavily forested town. Most of our streets, even busy ones, are canopied by trees. If I took photos of these same places days before, you'd have seen homes and businesses surrounded by big, powerful trees with spring leaves. Now, you see only destruction.

This used to be a high school