Whirlwind

21

Pleasant Grove, Southeast Dallas, Texas

Pam Carraway had started her day before first light.

That morning, Pam, a part-time gym teacher, joined her search-and-rescue team in the parking lot of a Baptist church. Their fluorescent jackets glowed yellow, orange and green in the headlights of arriving vehicles.

You couldn’t tell by looking and talking with her, but Pam was not sure she could make it through another day.

As the sun rose, members of the volunteer group sipped coffee from commuter mugs and checked radios and phones while they were given their new assignment: the fringes of Lincoln Memorial Park Cemetery. Tornadoes had churned through the burial grounds and destroyed surrounding homes and businesses.

“The debris field is substantial,” Kel Zedler, the search manager, said. “It was searched yesterday by Jay Selinger’s group. We’ve been tasked to take one quadrant of the area and search it again. And, guys, it bears repeating that time is running out for survivors. Lives may depend on us.”

Some of the K-9 units yipped as the team climbed onto the school bus that would take them to their command post. As they drove in the twilight Pam adjusted to her muscle aches from yesterday’s marathon search.

She couldn’t shake off the secret overwhelming sense of loss and foreboding dwelling in a far corner of her heart.

Was it posttraumatic stress?

Suck it up, Carraway. This is no time to go to pieces.

Make no mistake, she was dedicated to the work, having started volunteering two years ago after the group had found her seventy-three-year-old father, an Alzheimer’s walk-away.

They’d saved his life, and she felt the best way to thank them was to be a part of the work they did.

Pam was already certified in CPR and advanced first aid. She was in excellent condition. The search team trained her on how to use compasses, maps, GPS, grid search practices, various advanced communications, weather, clue and evidence techniques. She’d learned incident management skills and could quote from four different manuals.

During the time Pam had been with the team, they’d helped search for bodies, missing children and seniors, hikers lost in the wilderness. They’d helped police look for guns or knives tossed after a crime.

As a searcher, Pam had been involved in helping locate twelve bodies. She had experience with making gruesome discoveries; still, she never got over the shock of seeing cadavers in various stages of decomposition. It never, ever got easier. She died a little each time, thinking of the families of the victims.

Yesterday her team searched through a section of Irving that had been hit hard. They’d made sixteen finds. Eight were deceased and Pam had found seven of them, including the man buried in rubble holding his dead wife, whose body had been cut in half by a roof beam.

The group also found eight people who survived. The power of the disaster was overwhelming. Some victims had been found miles from where they were when the storm hit. Some had been in trees, on rooftops, entwined in wrecked cars, enmeshed in debris or they had been torn to pieces.

Hope for finding survivors was ticking down according to medical estimates of the time a person could survive injury, exposure, without water or food. Gas lines were ruptured everywhere. In addition, there were health-and-safety laws outlining a deadline for debris to be removed before areas became vermin infested. There was a real fear that a victim, still alive, could be bulldozed into a dump truck and taken to a landfill.

That wasn’t all.

“You could use a tornado to attempt to get away with murder,” a team member who was a retired detective had told Pam, just as they got off the bus. “Place your victim amid the debris and it would be assumed the cause of death was from the tornado. Unless someone knew otherwise, you might get away with it.”

The possibility gave Pam a chill, but the truth was she was not sure she could survive finding another body, she thought, as they assembled at the command post. There, they were given their assigned zones and set out to process them.

Pam’s zone encompassed a section of the cemetery and a neighboring residential street, or what was left of it.

Police had sealed the area so search-and-rescue efforts could continue. The cemetery was a field of toppled trees and headstones. Huge patches of manicured lawns had been ripped from the earth. Across the street, houses had been flattened or shorn, exposing rooms, wiring and insulation. Topsoil had been hurled onto rooftops and cars overturned.

Pam searched the area as K-9 teams probed nearby. Clothing, toys, appliances and furniture were scattered everywhere. She found a real-estate for sale sign from Duncanville, which was about fifteen miles west. But so far she’d found no bodies, no survivors.

She was grateful.

Jay Selinger’s team was good, she thought. You could always count on them to do a thorough job.

Nearly two hours passed with Pam continuing her work amid the destruction of cars dropped on houses, more branches and tree limbs, and sections of walls hurled into residential streets. She came upon what must have been a day care. A heap of children’s furniture and toys buried beneath trees was all that was left.

She saw a doll, dirty and mud covered.

Pam bent down to grab the leg and froze.

It was not a doll.