City officials, Butler and Stoddard county emergency management agencies and community members took time on Monday to honor the 86 victims of the May 9, 1927, tornado, and presented new technology capable of saving lives in the modern era.
A new grant will enable $70,000 of improvements to the county’s tornado sirens, said Robbie Myers, Butler County EMA director. The sirens will be remote activation and more specific to the area in which a tornado has been sighted, he said. Butler County Severe Weather Response Team Director Craig Meador presented the launch of another key resource called Radar Omega, which combines weather camera footage, police and weather spotter scanners, radar updates and real-time weather camera footage into a video stream accessible to meteorologists, storm spotters and residents alike.
“Stoddard County has a network as well that they put up and ... Andrew (Bohnert) is the one that kind of turned us on to this,” said BCSWRT Assistant Field Coordinator Keith Berry. “And so we’ve got a pretty nice network between Butler and Stoddard counties of cameras out there to ... help provide information back to the National Weather Service as well as our local authorities.”
Bohnert, director of the Stoddard County EMA, explained, “It’s one of the best tools we can have to help keep our community safer.”
Radar Omega is accessible for free on YouTube, Facebook and Twitch under Poplar Bluff Severe Weather Response Team, or at the push of a button with the Radar Omega app. The Radar Omega app also provides weather model readings like barometric pressure. Five Radar Omega cameras are placed around the county, as well as nine in Stoddard County, who was first to have the system.
While looking at the future of forecasting, the city also commemorated the lives lost in the past. Poplar Bluff History Museum Director Kati Ray displayed photos and obituaries of several victims and read their names for those assembled.
“We have something now that we did not have in 1927, and I just want to throw in my thanks to Robbie Myers and all the EMA storm spotters and the first responders, because if they would’ve had that back then, we may have fared a little bit better during that terrible disaster,” Ray said.
The tragedy stuck with families for decades. Local attorney Cameron Parker recalled her own family’s memory of the storm: her great-grandparents Robert and Edith Miller lived on what is now PP Highway, and “They would tell my grandpa stories about seeing the debris flying through the air.”
The tornado ripped apart 35 blocks of Poplar Bluff. The wreckage was hauled away and buried, but has recently resurfaced in a testament to Poplar Bluff’s regrowth.
“Some of it was unearthed here not long ago when they resurfaced the street between the car wash and Walgreen’s,” said Meador, explaining that area was outside the city limits of the time at the time. Another dumping ground was the location of CARSTAR Poplar Bluff. “All underneath there is a bunch of that rubble — cause again, that was way out of town.”
Poplar Bluff regrew after the tornado, but there is no doubt the tragedy left an indelible mark on its people.
“It carried on for years, and I think in many ways we never recovered from (losing) what those people could’ve contributed to Poplar Bluff and to the world,” said Ray.