It now has more than 3,600.īoth Meeker and Mathis describe their Facebook pages as a public service for the people of Joplin. Mathis said in a phone interview that she was astounded to see the page attract more than 60 “likes” within the first few minutes after she created it. “But I posted on my page, and I assume that my friends and family in that area reposted.” “I kind of expected it to be more of my family and friends, and maybe their families and friends,” Mathis said. college student, who grew up in Missouri, established the “ Joplin Tornado Citizen Checks” page late Sunday night and was attracting as many as 50 posts per hour by Monday afternoon. “We were getting inundated with families requesting information or trying to get out information for their loved ones.”Īs the Globe was setting up its reunification page, 24-year-old Rachelle Mathis had the idea to do the same thing. “It just took off almost immediately,” Meeker said. Meeker, the Joplin Globe editor, said the newspaper decided to start its tornado survivor page Sunday night after staffers noticed people were beginning to post missing persons reports on the Globe’s main Facebook site. After the 2007 shooting at Virginia Tech, a student created a Facebook group called “ I’m ok at VT.” More recently, such groups sprouted following last month’s Alabama tornadoes and the March 11 earthquake and tsunami in Japan. It’s becoming common for so-called “family reunification” pages to appear on Facebook after natural disasters and other deadly events. “We had sent numerous texts to her trying to locate her.” “We were very relieved,” McDermott told me in a phone interview. That ended a night of anxiety for Baker’s friend Shannon McDermott, who lives in nearby Granby, Missouri and had been unable to reach Baker for more than 12 hours after the tornado. “Adrienne Baker and children are safe,” read a post on one of the Facebook sites Monday morning. “It’s a lot of individual stories, and a lot of them are not going to end happily.”īut amid the desperation and ominous missing person reports, there have been some happy endings. “It’s heart-wrenching,” said Scott Meeker, the Globe’s enterprise editor who administers the newspaper’s Facebook page. He was last in Joplin on the way home from his high school graduation.” “He has been missing for over 12 hours and his family is looking for him. (Mike Gullett/AP)Īnd on a page titled “ Joplin people accounted for after the storm,” a Springfield, Missouri resident posted a photo of an 18-year-old friend. The tornado tore a path a mile wide and four miles long destroying homes and businesses. Meanwhile, a Facebook page called “ Joplin Tornado Citizen Checks” included pleas from an East Joplin resident looking for her grandpa “who drank coffee every morning at McDonald’s at 28th & Main.” A man carries a young girl who was rescued after being trapped with her mother in their home after a tornado hit Joplin, Mo. A Joplin resident who picked up several children in a destroyed neighborhood listed their names in hopes their parents would call. Another poster hoped to hear from her Aunt Bertha. On the Globe’s page, a 15-year-old girl asked for help finding her missing mother. And all of the pages conveyed survivors and loved ones’ desperation. A pair of pages created by concerned volunteers each attracted more than 3,000 “likes,” while the Globe’s page recorded more than 5,000. Within hours of the devastating storm - which killed more than 116 people and injured more than a thousand - at least four similar Facebook pages sprang up. The page encouraged Joplin residents to post a note if they made it through the tornado safely, and it allowed other people to post inquiries about friends and family members they haven’t been able to contact. So the city’s newspaper – the Joplin Globe – established a Facebook page to link tornado survivors with their family members and friends. Survivors have found it difficult to communicate with loved ones, while frantic relatives trying to call family members in Joplin can’t get through. After a massive tornado roared through Joplin, Mo., Sunday night, much of the city was left isolated without electricity, telephone service, or Internet connections.
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