aturday, July 23, 2011 | 5:19 p.m. CDT; updated 12:33 p.m. CDT, Monday, August 1, 2011
BY ALAN SCHER ZAGIER/THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
JOPLIN — Empty concrete pads where houses once stood. Untouched playgrounds still riddled with broken glass. A once-bustling retail district, eerily quiet on a weekend night.
Two months after a tornado split Joplin in half, recovery has barely begun, and the city remains focused on cleaning up massive mounds of debris. But leaders say Joplin and the neighboring village of Duquesne already face another question: How much to rebuild and how much to reinvent?
"Ninety-nine percent of the time, what we really want to do is return to business as usual, go back to exactly what was there at the earliest possible time, get everyone back in their homes," said Bob Berkebile, a Kansas City architect and disaster recovery specialist who has been working informally as a consultant in Joplin. "But I have never seen a community where they couldn't have made a decision to build back something different."
In Joplin, city officials, neighborhoods and families are beginning to confront decisions that involve trade-offs of cost, speed, quality and uncertainty.
They could strengthen building codes to produce better houses, which might also cause some delay; plot out more parks and amenities that would raise the quality of life but require detailed planning; require new storm safety features that would balance peace of mind against greater expense for those of modest incomes.
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