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Photos bring hope to the residents of Joplin


Local residents have been cleaning and sorting out thousands of photographs that have been found among debris after an EF-5 tornado hit the city of Joplin, Missouri, in May.

The tornado, which was the deadliest to hit the US since 1947, devastated up to a third of the city and left 160 dead.

In the aftermath, as locals shifted through the rubble, they began to notice that photographs, torn out of photobooks and photo frames, had survived, reported the Associated Press (AP).

Such was the power of the tornado that some pictures were found as far as Oklahoma, Tennessee and Kansas.

Approximately 27,000 photographs have so far been salvaged and relocated to the First Baptist Church in Carthage, where kind-hearted volunteers are painstakingly restoring the images and sorting them out.

Angela Waters, a genealogist from Oklahoma, told the AP: "When a disaster happens, as soon as you hear a family is safe, the next thing you always think about is photos.

"They're irreplaceable. We can go back to the time and place and people we don't have in front of us anymore. They're the record of our lives."

Ms Walters has since set up a Facebook page called the Lost Photos of Joplin, which is an online archive of the photos currently housed at the church.
 

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