Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Branson cleanup continues
Tourist town works to reopen its businesses after twister.
The Baldknobbers Jamboree in Branson canceled shows for only the second time in 53 years as workers continued cleaning up debris from what locals are calling “the leap day tornado.”
Early Wednesday morning, an EF2 tornado with winds of about 130 mph scathed the city’s theater district, downtown and Branson Landing as it appeared to hop through town peeling metal roofs from buildings and blowing the windows out of hotel rooms.
“We do not cancel a whole lot of shows,” said Hollye Gurley, general manager of the jamboree. “This was a tough decision for us.”
The only other time the jamboree canceled a show was when a performer died of a heart attack in 2006, Gurley said.
Gurley said the theater will reopen Thursday. The longest running show in
Branson will miss four nights because of the tornado that damaged several buildings along Missouri 76, which in town is known as “the Branson strip.”
“I’ve got to get a street sweeper in here and really get rid of nails and glass and debris,” Gurley said. “We filled a lot of Dumpsters today.”
Most businesses damaged by the tornado will be open in a matter of days, said Lynn Berry, a spokesman for the Branson/lakes Area Chamber of Commerce and Convention and Visitors Bureau.
The city’s convention center will be closed for three to four months for repairs related to water damage, Berry said. The Hilton Hotel, attached to the convention center, will be closed about three months, the hotel’s manager said.
The visitors bureau will try to find alternate sites for groups that had conventions scheduled during that time, Berry said. The 110,000square-foot convention center is the largest venue in Branson.
If groups need larger sites, the visitors bureau will try to steer them toward southwest Missouri cities such as Springfield, she said.
The city’s tourism season begins in mid-march when schools begin closing for spring break, Berry said. Fortunately, the storm hit during the off-season and midweek when there were few tourists in town.
Most regional tourist destinations, including theme park Silver Dollar City, weren’t damaged by the storm.
The tornado caused the temporary closure of seven of the Branson’s 50 theaters and eight of its more than 100 attractions. Also, 22 of the city’s 200 hotels were temporarily closed for repairs. Some business owners still were waiting late Thursday for electricity to be turned back on.
Empire District Electric Co. reported that customer outages were down from 6,000 early Wednesday to about 500 by 4 p.m. Thursday. The EF2 tornado was on the ground for 19 minutes beginning at 1:13 a.m., cutting a 22-mile-long path from Joe Bald Road in Kimberling City, Mo., to 2 miles east of Kissee Mills, Mo. The path was a maximum of 400 yards wide, according to the National Weather Service.
The Enhanced Fujita scale measures the severity of tornadoes, with EF zero being the least damaging and EF5 the worst.
It was one of several tornadoes reported across the Midwest on Wednesday. A total of 12 people were killed by the storms.
“If it had been four hours earlier, there would have been 300 people in our theater,” said Jeannie Horton, general manger of the “Legends in Concert” show at Dick Clark American’s Bandstand Theater in Branson.
Performing on stage that night were impersonators of Elvis Presley, the Blues Brothers, Barry White, Marilyn Monroe and Shania Twain.
Horton said the theater will be closed for about a month for repairs. She said some performers may be put to work helping with the rebuilding effort so they can be kept on the payroll until the theater reopens.
Horton said she doesn’t envision the faux Blues Brothers wielding hammers and saws in the theater, but one of them is a good videographer, and he might be put to good use with that skill.
June Tillis, director of the Veterans Memorial Museum of Branson, said the museum building wasn’t damaged but a full-size replica of a North American P-51 Mustang airplane out front “was blown off its perch.”
“It broke all to pieces,” she said. “It’s kind of like Humpty Dumpty right now. I don’t know if we’ll be able to get it repaired or not.”
Mary Kellogg-joslyn, who owns the Titanic Museum, said the tornado missed the museum by about 100 feet. She was still waiting for electricity late Thursday; otherwise the museum in a half-sized Titanic ship replica would have been open for business, she said.
The Titanic’s corporate office, however, in a different location, was destroyed, Kellogg-joslyn said. The 45 people who work there, mainly booking reservations for the museum, had to be moved to the Branson Tourism Center on Wednesday.
“I come from [Los Angeles] and New York and Chicago, and I was so impressed at how organized Branson was, informing the community every step of the way,” Kellogg-joslyn said.
Nineteen people stayed in the Branson Recplex on Wednesday night because of damage to their residences, according to a news release from the city.
Berry said Americorps of St. Louis set up shop at the Branson chamber and was coordinating the volunteer effort. The group encourages people interested in helping with the cleanup to sign up online at the website volunteerbranson.org.