Bluff Estates residents reach out to neighbors after storm

The dawn silence on Saturday, March 15, was broken by a chainsaw and a revving engine. After weathering the previous night’s tornado, the Shields family got to work clearing roads for their neighbors and emergency services in the Bluff Estates neighborhood on Sunset Drive in Poplar Bluff.

“We were blocked in,” James Shields explained. “And just a general need of access for everybody. Plus, if anybody’s hurt, I want EMS to get to them pretty quick.”

James, his sister-in-law Angel Shields, and James' parents live close to each other and began clearing their driveways Saturday morning. They then moved up Meadows Road and Schweitzer Drive with a Kubota tractor and chainsaw, occasionally checking in with neighbors.

“Everyone’s preoccupied elsewhere, so you gotta take some responsibility. It’s our home,” Angel added.

Meadows Road and Schweitzer Drive were hard-hit streets. Daylight revealed crushed vehicles, broken power poles strung with dead lines, torn roofs and half-crushed homes.

One largely untouched house was occupied by a woman named Bernice. She lives at the Twin Towers but came to Bluff Estates Friday night after a call from her daughter, who was out of town but saw the weather alerts.

“She said ‘Mom, get to the house,” Bernice recalled.

She weathered the storm with her daughter’s loyal Rottweiler lying across her feet as they sheltered in the basement. In the morning, the Meadows Road house was largely untouched. There was still cause to mourn, though — the tree where her daughter and son-in-law took their engagement photos was split in two.

One street over, on Schweitzer, Chris Shrum emerged to find his two vehicles pinned under a tree. One was crushed but the other, a pickup, still ran. Shrum used it to charge his phone in the morning.

“I didn’t know what to do. I kind of ran,” he said, recalling the storm’s arrival. “I was like, ‘What am I going to do? Grab this mattress and throw it over me?’”

Afterward, he stepped outside with his flashlight to survey the damage and found his neighbors all doing the same. Besides the damage to his vehicles, Shrum lost several trees and at least one window, and found a branch through his roof.

He wasn’t sure how much he should clear before the insurance company arrived.

"I’m going to get them here to look before I start cutting stuff up ... because this is major damage,” he said. “There’s no telling how much it’s going to cost to replace. Of course, I’m happy that I’m alive, and I know that there were fatalities.”

He also sympathized with a family up the street, the Boles, who moved in a few weeks ago. Parents Taylor and Alexis Boles recalled the tornado driving them into the basement with their young child and two dogs.

“We didn’t know that it was a tree that fell,” Alexis recalled, gesturing to the trunk and branches slanted across the roof. “We heard a lot of commotion, and it was kind of almost quiet for a minute — and then it just all of a sudden, my ears were popping, so I was like, something’s happening.”

Taylor Boles, a fire department employee, inspected the damage but couldn’t see its full extent right away.

“I opened the front door and saw just a branch. I didn’t know there was an actual whole tree there. And then I was looking at it after the storm passed — I realized that there was a hole in the roof, so I went to the baby’s room and ... there was a huge branch shoved into the baby’s room, and the whole room was destroyed inside,” he said.

The Boles didn’t know where their next steps would take them, but despite the situation, their greatest feeling seemed to be gratitude. As Alexis noted, everyone was unhurt and alive. “It could’ve been a lot worse.”