Survivors pick through ruins after monster storm kills 40 across U.S.

The inclement weather was supposed to pass around midnight late Friday, so Christopher Mattox figured his trailer home in Poplar Bluff, Missouri, was safe. When his wife, Dolores, asked whether he was worried, he recalled responding: “No, baby, I sleep real good when it storms.”

Lounging in his flannel pajamas and sipping a Pepsi, Mattox flicked on the news. Then came the sound of hail pounding his roof. Suddenly, the three-bedroom mobile home shook, and Mattox gripped his mattress. Mirrors and his TV were flung across the room as the home tipped a few inches off its base.

“It felt like I was literally on a carpet ride,” Mattox, 68, told the Washington Post.

When the tornado passed a few seconds later, Mattox’s home was destroyed. He shined a flashlight through a shattered window to make out dismantled mobile home parts littering his neighborhood’s gravel. Mattox heard his neighbors calling for help, but he could barely move himself.

A flurry of questions swirled in his mind: Where am I going to live? What am I going to do next? How do I move on from losing everything?

Survivors have been asking similar questions in more than a half-dozen states after a monster storm system spawned tornadoes that pulverized homes, dust storms that caused freeway pileups and fires that scorched hundreds of structures over the weekend. At least 40 people have been killed.

The storms were caused by two strong low-pressure systems – one that tracked across the Plains on Friday and another in the Deep South on Saturday. The systems drew unseasonably warm and humid air from the Gulf of Mexico, causing high levels of atmospheric instability, which is thunderstorm fuel.

In Oklahoma, low humidity and gusts of wind powerful enough to overturn tractor-trailers sparked fires. Four people died in the state and 142 were injured, authorities said, in incidents related to fires and high winds.

Drew Boers, a 75-year-old retired beer distributor, and his wife, Julie, sat at a folding table Sunday afternoon in the driveway of their neighbor’s home in Stillwater, Oklahoma, which escaped the flames unscathed.

A group from the nearby Countryside Church made hot meals for fire victims digging through the ashes. As Boers talked about the chicken and dumplings he had enjoyed moments earlier, a white American Red Cross van stopped to offer help and food.

“You can’t beat the food they’ve got here,” Boers said with a chuckle while thanking the Red Cross volunteers for their concern.

Boers, a father of four, was spraying his backyard with a water hose Friday afternoon when he realized the fire was approaching his house. Boers and his wife evacuated with their wallets, phones and cars, but they lost almost everything else. The couple’s brick mailbox looked untouched Sunday, but the brick entryway and ashes were all that remained of their ruined home.

“You can replace furniture,” Boers said. “But what we lost that we can’t replace are my high school yearbook and photo albums that are from the predigital age because they’re printed pictures, and things like that.”

“We keep thinking of more things,” he added. “So we’ll be sad for a while, but then we’ll probably rebuild, and life goes on.”

The storm wreckage cut across the Deep South and Midwest. Three people were killed in Arkansas, six in Mississippi and three in Alabama. In Kansas, at least eight people were killed after the weather front brought high winds and a dust storm that degraded visibility for motorists and triggered a massive pileup. Car crashes killed four more people on the Texas panhandle.

But Missouri suffered the most fatalities thus far. At least 12 people died in the state after more than a dozen tornadoes ripped through, demolishing homes and hewing swaths of trees in their paths.

After the tornado struck Mattox’s home, Dolores Mattox crawled across the trailer to her husband. Neither had been injured.

Police helped Mattox walk out of his home, which he rented for $600 a month. He walked about a half-mile to a staging area that local officials had organized. On the way, Mattox saw that his mobile home, still standing but unfit to live in, was in better condition than most of his neighbors’ homes, some of which had appeared to vanish.

Mattox’s 33-year-old daughter, Miha, drove him and Dolores a few miles to her house, where they arrived around 2:30 a.m.

Later that day, Mattox returned to his home to scavenge items. When he arrived, Mattox said, he felt the fear he had experienced hours earlier. Then, he felt sad seeing his furniture, TVs, clothes and Bible ripped apart on the ground. Mattox said he lost his hydrocodone, an opioid he typically takes every three hours for pain from his injury, causing him excruciating pain since early Saturday morning.

Afterward, Mattox and Dolores, 56, went to the Comfort Inn he said his homeowner’s insurance is covering for a few days. Until he finds a new home, Mattox said, he doesn’t want to mourn what he lost.

“I’m talking thousands and thousands of dollars of stuff that’s just gone,” Mattox said. “Just gone.”

He paused for a second.

“I don’t know, man,” he continued. “I don’t want to talk too much about that. I just want to look on the bright side of things right now. If I go back, it kind of drains me.”

When Mattox woke up Sunday morning, after sleeping for the first time in more than 30 hours, he was dreading returning to the place he once called home, where he would continue to search for anything salvageable.