The Oklahoman (Oklahoma City, OK)

May 13, 2008 Tuesday

City Edition

The future: The outlook was already bleak for contaminated town; now it appears hopeless;

'I don't think you can heal from something like this'

BYLINE: John David Sutter, Staff Writer

SECTION: NEWS; Pg. 9A

DATELINE: PICHER

With a government buyout in progress, some victims can't leave Picher, but they can barely go back.

PICHER - Bruised and battered, with her feet bandaged like cocoons and her ankles looking like they'd been splattered with ink, Kim Johnson returned Monday to her home in Picher for the first time since tornadoes tore through her town.

Some walls were standing, but most everything else was flattened. Now she's one of 12 family members staying in a two-bedroom trailer. She doesn't know what she'll do in the long term, but she knows she won't rebuild here.

"Picher's gone," she said.

The victims of Saturday's tornado - which killed seven people here and 18 in Missouri - face a unique barrier to recovery as they search through the rubble of their homes and check on loved ones who've been hospitalized or killed: They can't go back.

Picher - before the storm and now - is in the middle of a government buyout. The area was heavily undermined over the decades, and studies have shown houses are susceptible to collapse. Mountains of gravel waste a hundred feet high, laced with heavy metals, surround the town. In the past, local children have tested high for lead, which is a neurotoxin.

Everyone who wanted to be was on their way out anyway before the tornado hit.

Those who stayed are in a terrifying and heart-breaking limbo. Rebuilding would be foolish, they say. But if they don't, their hometown is gone forever with no proper farewell.

Two days after the storm, many said they're still in complete shock.

"I don't think you can heal from something like this," said Picher Mayor Sam Freeman, whose house was destroyed. "It's hard for me to think about it without crying, just because so many people are so devastated."

'No place to go'

Orval "Hoppy" Ray's home was among those not badly damaged in the storm. Ray stayed in a motel Sunday night but said he will move back into town and live there soon.

"Hell, I ain't got no place to go, and it's just me anyway," he said.

He said the storm was "another nail in the coffin" for the town he loves.

As for Johnson, she'll continue in the trailer with 11 family members for now. Johnson said her destroyed home was "totally different" from what she remembered the last time she saw it, just after the storm on Saturday.

During the storm, she curled up in a ball, covering up her head with one hand and grabbing onto her husband's boot with the other, "because I didn't want to get separated," she said. The wind pulled her legs into the air. Debris slammed up against them, making her battered feet feel like Jell-O, she said.

Monday, as the 32-year-old went through the rubble, "the sky was clear, but (at) every little wind I thought it was coming back," she said.

Johnson can't sleep. She has nightmares about the storm.

And in the day, she cries.

"I don't really know what I feel. I know what happened ... and I know it's bad, but I don't know why I cry," she said. "I can't be alone. I know that."