Thomas Gounley

TGOUNLEY@NEWS-LEADER.COM

Thad Beeler remembers standing in his parents' house in Joplin in May 2011, the morning after a tornado roared through the city.

Trees had collapsed onto the roof — which was good in a bizarre way, because that kept it from blowing away. There was damage, but on the wall, pictures of Beeler as a kid were still hanging.

The home next to Beeler's parents was simply gone, only the center stairwell still standing. Beeler remembers looking at it and realizing that any pictures hanging on the neighbors' walls were gone, too.

“I didn’t have any idea that that thought would actually mean something later,” Beeler said.

A day or two after that, a man stopped by First Baptist Church in Carthage, where Beeler works as music director. He had found some storm-blown photos on his property and was wondering what to do with them.

Beeler saw an opportunity to help.

Within days, he and fellow church members began an effort to gather the photos the tornado had dispersed across the region. They ultimately collected some 35,000 pictures and came up with a method of painstakingly cleaning, organizing and scanning them. Then it was a matter of getting the images back to the people who had lost them.

In the five years since the storm, about 18,000 photos have been returned. This past weekend was something of a final push. But the effort, by all accounts unprecedented in organization and scale, isn't wrapping up — for several years now, it's been shifting into its second phase.

What began as “Lost Photos of Joplin” is now the National Disaster Photo Rescue, which aims to spread what the group has learned to other areas of the country affected by tornadoes and hurricanes.

Through trial and error, a process

After the conversation at church, Beeler sent an email to a generic American Red Cross account, offering to try to collect photos and return them to storm victims. He thought there would be some standard protocol, that the organization might suggest some basic steps he should follow.

The response: There wasn't.

He moved forward anyway. First came collection. Beeler, along with other volunteers from the church and community, spread the word on Facebook that they were gathering photos. Branches of Southwest Missouri Bank, along with other businesses in the region, served as collection points.

Duane Hallock, now the regional communications director for American Red Cross of Western Missouri, was one of numerous employees from the organization who were in Joplin following the tornado. He still considers the photo collection effort "one of the neatest things" about the recovery.

"I had many people with the Red Cross community comment on what a neat idea it was," Hallock said. "Nobody had seen that."

Often, photos arrived damp and dirty. Sometimes, there was a "brick" — Beeler's term for a bunch of pictures that got wet and became clumped together. So the next step was cleaning. Through trial and error, the group eventually decided that used dryer sheets were ideal, gentle enough to take dirt off an image without damaging it.

In the aftermath of the tornado, Donna Turner, who attends the same church as Beeler, wanted to help in some way — most everyone did back then. But Turner, 65 years old at the time, needed an alternative to physical labor in the midday sun.

"I knew I could not come up to Joplin and pick up debris," she said.

But she had the patience needed to work with photos.

After cleaning, it was a matter of sorting. Were than any photos that looked similar to others? Which ones had arrived together? Each photo received a unique 9-digit code. Any writing on the back was recorded.

All associated photos were placed together in the same manila envelope. All the envelopes were numbered. The envelopes were placed in boxes. The boxes were numbered.

The end goal was always to get photos back to their owners, so the images were scanned and uploaded to the group's website. It took some time to find the right scanner and to figure out the best resolution. A higher resolution meant a longer scanning time. Too low a resolution and the picture might not be as recognizable.

A small number of photos the group collected never were scanned, including those showing an open casket at a funeral. The hope was to connect tornado victims with happier memories, Beeler said, and it seemed a bit dark to upload photos of deceased relatives to the web.

Photos that were, shall we say, risque, also were kept out of the scanner.

"There were a few ... You get the grandmas at the church looking at all the pictures, trying to clean them, and they go, ‘Oh my goodness,'" Beeler said. "We were still respectful."

In most of those cases, the photos were clearly associated with other pictures that were more suitable to be scanned and put online, Beeler said. If someone came in to claim those photos, they would find the other, more private shots in the same folder.

Once the scanned images were online, it was a matter of spreading the word on Facebook again. Browse through the images. See any you recognize? Contact the group with its 9-digit code.

Special days established to return photos

The last step in the process was, and is, reunification.

The group starting cleaning photos in late June, a month after the tornado struck. The first "reunification day" was held that September.

For a while, they continued at a rate of about once a month. Eventually, reunification days became less frequent, more dependent on how many people were emailing to say they recognized their photos online.

The most recent reunification day — probably the 28th or 29th one held, Beeler estimates — was Sunday, the five-year anniversary of the tornado.

It'll likely be the last organized event, although group volunteers will still find a way to get photos to people in the future as needed.

Each person arriving to pick up photographs on a reunification day is assigned to a volunteer who has received basic training in grief counseling.

“We’re there to give them their photographs back and we’re there to listen," Beeler said. "We’re not there to talk.”

Turner, who has worked numerous reunification days, said everyone reacts differently. She recalled one man, a local teacher, who would "go through two or three photos, and then he’d have to stop and tell us a story."

"He was there for hours,” she said.

Reunification days can be an emotional time. Part of the reason it has taken a while to return photos, Turner said, is that some people affected by the tornado didn't immediately want to get them back.

"Many people for the longest time were not ready to face anything personal like this," she said.

Beeler said reunification days could be equally important for the group's volunteers, many of whom spent hundreds of hours working with other people's memories.

“We do see ourselves in these pictures," Beeler said. "You see the moments of time. You see the birthday parties, you see the photos from the 1970s or '80s or earlier. You see the kid blowing out the candles and you see yourself there, or your child."

"It's just the way it is," he continued. "You need closure. You need to know that those pictures go back to people, so we encourage our people early on in the process who are helping with cleaning and so on to also help give them back. Because the relief that you see on a family’s face during reunification day is worth it all.”

The approximately 18,000 photos that have been returned to date have gone to more than 700 Joplin-area families. In late April, Beeler looked through some of the remaining pictures with a News-Leader reporter and photographer.

He picked a random box, then selected a random envelope. Inside was a picture of a horse — brown, with white markings on its forehead.

"I don't know if this means anything to someone or not, but it's not for us to decide," he said.

Beeler opened another envelope. A black-and-white photo of a bride on her wedding day. She's posed, smiling directly at the camera.

"Hard to believe that somebody wouldn't want that back," he said. "Just a great photo, beautiful dress."

The next envelope.

"Ah look, another wedding photo," Beeler said. "There's a lot of those."

Taking the effort nationwide

Lost Photos of Joplin was originally the name of a Facebook page, and soon informally became a name for the whole effort. But the group rebranded itself as National Disaster Photo Rescue about three years ago, Beeler said, once it realized that it could "take this model and be able to help other communities help themselves."

Cita Sue Cox, who lives in the Dallas, Texas, area, learned of the photo rescue in 2013 while attending a conference for personal photo organizers like herself. She wanted to get involved, but at first there wasn't an obvious way for someone in Texas to assist a group based in Missouri.

Then, in late December 2015, a tornado hit Garland and Rowlett, two suburbs of Dallas. Cox has led the effort to collect photos. More than 1,300 of them have been scanned and uploaded; volunteers hope to hold their first reunification day next month.

“It’s just part of what I do, which is stress with people how important it is to preserve that history and those memories … because it can be taken away so quickly,” Cox said.

Beeler is in the process of writing guidebooks for volunteers and organizations that want to emulate the group's efforts. He envisions sending people to areas affected by natural disasters within the first two days, to get the local effort started.

Cox said the hope is to have some name recognition, so people all over no longer wonder what to do with photos scattered by a storm. Hallock, the American Red Cross spokesperson, called the effort "certainly an idea worth replicating."

In addition to the Dallas area, National Disaster Photo Rescue has been involved in the aftermath of tornadoes in Baxter Springs, Kansas; Van, Texas; and Moore, Oklahoma. And the group has received calls from other countries.

"I don't know where this leads me," Beeler said. "But I know it's obvious we're not supposed to let this die."

Also available for pick-up: The photos of Murwin Mosler

National Disaster Photo isn't the only entity in Joplin trying to get photos back to people.

The city's Everett J. Ritchie Tri-State Mineral Museum also houses thousands of negatives that correspond to photos taken by Murwin Mosler. Mosler began working as a photographer in the city during the Great Depression and continued doing so for decades.

Mosler died in 2003, but the negatives were still in his home when the tornado arrived in May 2011, severely damaging the structure. The museum collected the negatives from the rubble and is now trying to get them back to the individuals featured in the photos.

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