After a catastrophic tornado leveled a third of Joplin, Mo., in 2011, Mark Rohr sat in a fire station surrounded by a sea of FEMA “blue jackets” and was told that temporary-housing trailers for thousands of residents left homeless by the storm would be delivered “by the first frost.”

It was May at the time.

The first frost was six months away.

“I turned around, looked up at them and said, ‘That’s unacceptable. That’s too long,’ ” said Rohr, then Joplin’s city manager. “If we didn’t keep people close to the city, keep the ties, we’re going to lose them permanently.”

The need to move fast and keep the community together drove every step of Joplin’s recovery from the costliest tornado on record, a mile-wide monster that killed 161 people, destroyed 4,500 homes and businesses and caused nearly $3 billion in damage. The 2011 twister also is the most-studied and offers vital lessons for rebuilding Mayfield, Bowling Green and other communities slammed by severe tornadoes Dec. 10-11.

“The first year is all adrenaline. Then people realize the length of time it takes to get back. And you realize how hard it is,” said Jane Cage, a small-business owner who helped lead the Joplin rebuilding effort and later was recruited by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to teach other communities.

“It all takes so much longer than you think,” she said.

In the early evening May 22, 2011, Joplin was hit by a multi-vortex F5 storm packing winds later estimated to have reached 200 mph. Entire neighborhoods were flattened. The main hospital was a total loss. Several schools, churches, a nursing home and dozens of businesses were destroyed. At least 10,000 people needed temporary shelter.

As they assessed the devastation, Joplin officials quickly set an urgent goal: Keep the city’s population at 51,000. They knew some people would move on rather than rebuild. But a mass exodus could bankrupt Joplin, a regional economic hub in Missouri’s southwest corner, leading to spiraling losses of people, taxes and momentum.

“We needed to do something to create a vision for where we could end up,” Rohr said.

Rohr began talking about rebuilding to honor the memory of those who had died. Early on, he held a news conference almost every day to update residents on what was happening and to hammer home his vision, invoking “the miracle of the human spirit.”

“They had to see that something good could come out of something horrific,” Rohr said.

At the time, the long-term goals were fuzzy. But getting there required immediate concrete action. For starters, the streets needed to be cleared.

“We had to clean up to get started on the rebuild,” said Gary Shaw, a city council member at the time.

Thousands of volunteers flocked to the city – so many that Joplin abandoned a plan to limit access to the hardest-hit areas in hopes of deterring looters and gawkers. Federal and state agencies also pitched in.

Once streets were cleared, trucks could haul off the debris from thousands of destroyed homes and buildings. The Army Corps of Engineers coordinated the movements. Three million cubic yards of debris were pulled in 68 days – so fast that the city met goals allowing federal and state authorities to pick up almost the entire multimillion-dollar price tag.

None of it was easy. Debris had to be piled before it could be collected. Truck trips had to be coordinated. Landfills had to be willing to take unexpected mountains of trash.

Once the slate was wiped clean, city officials had to decide what to put back. They argued over changes to the building code. It seemed insane to rebuild houses to the same standards, leaving them vulnerable to the next tornado.

“We wanted to mitigate the risk,” said Troy Bolander, head of the city’s planning department. “But we’re still a blue-collar community. We needed to strike a balance.”

About 40% of the deaths in Joplin occurred in houses – much higher than the historical average – because of a lack of basements and “inadequate structural conditions,” according to a study by Kansas researchers.

Some people wanted to require every house to have a concrete storm shelter. But that would have increased the cost of each new home by $5,000. The city settled on requiring stiffer wall and roof connections, and stronger load systems. That raised the cost, but only by an additional $600 per home, Bolander said.

Joplin officials did decide to add storm shelters when they rebuilt the wrecked schools. Later, they also added storm shelters at schools that had survived the tornado.

The role of collapsed homes and buildings in Joplin’s enormous death toll was scrutinized by a team from the National Institute of Standards and Technology – the same federal agency now probing the June condo building collapse in Surfside, Fla.

The technical investigation produced 16 recommendations for improving buildings in tornado-prone areas. So far, however, just one of the recommendations has found its way into building codes across the nation: A new standard for storm shelters.

Bolander described the rebuilding process as a constant balancing act. Big decisions had to be made that would reverberate for years.

“We didn’t want to move too fast,” he said. “But we didn’t want to be so slow as to be discouraging.”

Even rapid progress could be obscured by the massive scale of the loss. Joplin has built five new homes a week, on average, in the decade since the tornado. But even at that pace, it has yet to replace every home lost.

In the first weeks after the tornado, pledges of short-term and permanent solutions protected against despair.

Ten public school buildings were destroyed or severely damaged, yet the superintendent promised that students would be back in classrooms on time in the fall, three months later. He accomplished that goal with temporary locations.

It took three years before the last of the new replacement buildings – Joplin High School – opened up.

The owners of the devastated St. John’s Regional Medical Center pledged to rebuild with a new medical campus and keep staff on the payroll, offering services at other locations in the meantime. The new Mercy Hospital Joplin opened four years later.

Residents also had a say in the rebuilding.

Cage, whose small computer business downtown had only minor damage, led an advisory group to gather local opinions. It was a chance to reimagine Joplin.

At Cage’s first meeting, just a few weeks after the tornado, she heard from a flood of people wanting sidewalks on both sides of the street, new trees and underground utility lines. They wanted walkable neighborhoods.

“A disaster can really be an opportunity to do better,” Cage said.

The payoff was a long way off. Joplin received more than $150 million in federal grants, but the funds were spread out over several years. Most of the money went to rebuilding sewers and streets.

Two years after the tornado, when the rebuilding had fallen into a steady rhythm, Cage set out to record what they’d learned.

“I felt we were going to lose the institutional knowledge if we didn’t write it down,” she said.

She got dozens of volunteers to record their advice for other communities hit by disasters, pulled it together as a book and published it on the city’s website. The book has been downloaded about 900 times.

“It really comes down to making sure people have a place to work, a place to live, a place for their kids to go to school,” Cage said.

The disaster – coupled with the hard work of rebuilding – also took a mental toll. Researchers found high rates of post-traumatic stress disorder and depression among teenagers after the Joplin tornado. Drug abuse increased. Worries about suicide led to a public health slogan: “Don’t let one disaster lead to another.”

A center for child psychological services opened. St. John’s brought in a psychologist to train medical staff how to identify and treat PTSD – and head off long-term problems.

“When things fall off – after the six-month anniversary or the one-year anniversary – most communities feel forgotten,” said psychologist Doug Walker, who also did similar work in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

A decade after the tornado, some residents still get nervous when the sky turns stormy. Shaw said he used to stand on his porch and watch the clouds roll in.

No more.

“Now when I hear the (tornado) sirens,” he said, “I grab my wife and my dog and head to the basement.”

Rohr said he still tears up talking about the tornado. In the first year, he pushed away feelings of being shocked and overwhelmed because there was so much work to be done.

“I had to sublimate my feelings,” he said.

Despite the fervent pace of rebuilding, Joplin’s streets still bear scars from the tornado. The trees are shorter in the worst-hit neighborhoods. The homes are newer and look more like traditional subdivisions. And some stairs lead to empty foundations, places still waiting to be rebuilt.

“I don’t think we are completely recovered, but we are so far along,” Cage said.

Each time someone accesses the book Cage assembled about Joplin’s rebuilding campaign, she gets an email notification. Last week, she learned that it had been downloaded by someone near Mayfield. She said she also has been contacted about gathering Joplin residents to talk to people in Mayfield “to reassure them that there’s hope.”

In the first year after the tornado, Rohr failed in his efforts to maintain Joplin’s population. Although he rallied residents and got FEMA to deliver those temporary housing trailers in weeks instead of months – long before the first frost – the city’s population dipped by about 1,000 people.

But every year since, more people have called Joplin home than the day the tornado hit – a validation of Rohr’s urgent vision.

Rohr isn’t one of them, however. In 2014, he was fired after squabbling with the Joplin city council.

“Political reasons,” said Rohr, who now serves as city manager in a small town in East Texas.

It wasn’t the way Rohr wanted to end his campaign to save Joplin.

But in its own way, the return of small-town political infighting was one sign that Joplin was on the road to recovery.