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Inside MO hospital, mix of chaos and bravery

By CBS News/Associated Press  
   May 24, 2011

Jonathan Elliott had heard the tornado sirens blaring outside St. John's Regional Medical Center for about a half-hour when things suddenly took a terrifying turn. The building started shaking, the lights began to flicker and 16-year-old Elliott could feel the wind coming up beneath the floor in his grandfather's seventh-floor hospital room. It was time to make a move, he decided, and that's what Elliott and his grandmother did, making a dash for the relative safety of an inside stairwell. Up to that moment, "we had no idea it was going to blow," Elliott said. The tornado that smashed Joplin on Sunday evening also ravaged one of the town's major hospitals just when it was needed the most, killing at least six people in the building, blowing out windows and sucking up X-rays and medical records and dumping them two counties away.

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