Other tornado damaged cities offer advice on storm recovery
ST. LOUIS, Mo. (First Alert 4) -A devastating EF-5 tornado struck Joplin, Missouri on May 22, 2011. The community compiled a book with helpful advice for other cities titled, Joplin Pays It Forward.
Troy Bolander is the director of planning for Joplin and was working for the city when the tornado hit. He offered encouragement to St. Louis as the city works to respond and recover from the May 16th tornado.
“I have all the confidence in the world that St. Louis is going to recover,” he said.
Bolander encouraged St. Louis to create a broad-based group of volunteers to help plan the city’s recovery. He encouraged the city to keep track of volunteer hours since FEMA will reimburse for the number of volunteer hours. Joplin received $17 million for all the volunteer efforts.
He also encouraged the city to seek funding from the Department of Housing and Urban Affairs (HUD) as well as FEMA. He itted the pace of funding from FEMA was slow.
“Discouraging at first not receiving that funding as quickly as we did. It took a couple of years, a year and a half,” said Bolander.
He said the city received $158 million in funding from FEMA but it took a year-and-a-half for all of the assistance to reach the city.
The City of Moore, Oklahoma was hit by devastating tornadoes in 1999 and 2013. Deidre Ebrey is the assistant city manager for Moore and has worked for the city for 30 years. Her city also saw a slow response from FEMA.
“It’s those grass roots neighbor-to-neighbor organizations that are already in your area who come to aid in the very beginning,” she said.
Ebrey encourages other cities to plan ahead for storms by g memorandums of understanding with companies that can do debris removal and assist with animal control to be able to respond quickly when a tornado hits.
She also said it’s important to clean up storm debris quickly due to safety concerns and to improve the mindset of storm victims. She added that cities will need to use a variety of ways to communicate important information to storm victims because they will be displaced or are without power, and unable to access standard forms of communication.
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