Top: St. John's Cedar Co. EMS looks for survivors just after the tornado hit in 2003. Bottom: EMS employees Jamie and Lisa Swaggerty in front of the rebuilt Stockton square in 2006. The Swaggertys were on duty the night of the tornado.

While operations at St. John’s EMS primarily center on “normal” emergencies that occur every day, staff are always preparing for devastating events such as tornados, earthquakes, dam collapses, major fires, or homeland security events.

St. John’s EMS has a highly specialized team that is capable of responding to an unlikely event, such as a weapon of mass destruction detonation.

This team endures intense training programs to work hand-in-hand with the Homeland Security Response Team (HSRT) that responds to any such event. The Special Operations Response Team’s primary goal is to help with the care and decontamination of the crew members on the team so they will be ready, trained, and available to care for the sick and injured on the scene.

When an F3 tornado tore across Cedar County, Missouri May 4, 2003, it shattered a quiet Sunday evening and altered lives. But it also exposed the strength of a community.

The paramedics and emergency medical technicians of St. John’s Cedar County EMS played a vital role in meeting, coping with and recovering from the tragedy of the tornado.

Without regard for their own safety, they charged into the devastation, seeking and caring for the injured. They pushed their way through forests of fallen trees, loose power lines and mountains of debris. They treated, calmed and comforted those who had lost their homes and loved ones. They saw the worst – and best – the storm left behind in Stockton.

“I have been storm-spotting for 20 years and on that day (May 4, 2003) just like I had a hundred times before, I took my usual position on Highway 39 at the gravel pile north of town. The clouds were starting to move in, but at that time, I saw nothing that even hinted at what would happen,” says St. John’s Cedar County EMS Manager Dennis Winston.

As the storm hit, Winston headed for town, but had to pull over because his truck was violently shaking. When he got to St. John’s EMS – Stockton, staff members Mike McAfee and Glennie Kinnitt were there monitoring
the radio.

Winston put out a call for all available ambulances to respond to Stockton. Meanwhile, off-duty EMS employees started arriving.

Husband and wife paramedic team Jamie and Lisa Swaggerty looked for victims as the storm hit Stockton and soon had one critical patient and many with minor injuries. People began arriving at the Stockton EMS station, some offering their assistance and others having no place else to go.

“We knew we needed to provide shelter for the displaced until a more suitable shelter could be opened. Transporting the injured to the hospital was difficult because Highway 32 was blocked east of town,” Winston explains.

A friend from town arrived at the EMS station with a generator and wired in some lights. With the lights on, people continued to arrive. Two local doctors and several nurses arrived. Janet Jordan, M.D., medical director of
St. John’s EMS, came in on an Aurora ambulance from Springfield and began triaging patients.

“Our ambulance facility was essentially a field hospital,” Dr. Jordan explains. “It had the only lights on the strip in Stockton. All of the roads were blocked because of downed trees and power lines. People gravitated toward the station and the light – they literally came to the light in the middle of this terrible disaster.”

Within a short time, Cedar County had eight or 10 St. John’s ambulances to begin transporting patients to area hospitals.

Patient Mary Carter had multiple injuries – six broken ribs, both lungs collapsed and one punctured, a broken collarbone, a shattered pelvis, both hips broken, lacerated kidney, liver and bladder, broken back, severed sciatic nerve, head injuries and multiple blood clots. She may also have been struck by lightning or electrocuted at some point during the storm.

Doctors gave her a 20 percent chance of surviving. Carter spent two months at St. John’s Hospital in Springfield and another month recuperating at the Missouri Rehabilitation Center in Mount Vernon.

Today, she continues to recover and rebuild her life in Stockton, although without her fiancé, Mark Wilcox, who died in the tornado.

The morning after the tornado, the Stockton EMS facility served as a relief station, feeding workers and helping with cleanup until a Red Cross post was set up at a Stockton church and other local groups took over providing supplies.

“I have been involved in emergency services for more than 20 years and have been a paramedic for more than 15 years. I have seen mass-casualty incidents of various sizes. Usually you have five to 10 patients in one area as a result of an accident. I have trained for, but never experienced, an incident that covered such a large area and created so many obstacles to overcome. The training and expertise that my St. John’s co-workers at Cedar County EMS have had for such incidents made my job as a manager much less stressful. Everyone knew what needed to be done, and they did it. We are part of the Stockton community – this is our town – and we wanted to do whatever we could to help,” Winston says.

*Much of this story was taken, with permission, from stories published in “Rising from the Rubble,” a book about the May 4, 2003 tornado, published by the Cedar County Republican in 2004.