By Kevin Murphy and Donald Bradley, Knight Ridder Newspapers
The Kansas City Star
Copyright 2006 The Kansas City Star
CLINTON, Mo. — Kevin Young looked up nervously at a 3-foot thick stack of bricks suspended above his head. Only flimsy plaster held it back.
Splintered beams hung gingerly.
Moments before, the three-story Elks building had collapsed, trapping Young and nine other men amid the buckled walls and floors. A shift here, a creak there could set off further collapse.
The men were afraid to move, fearing they would jar something loose.
All they could do was wait and stay calm.
Monday night began so routinely.
The Clinton Elks had shared food and fellowship at their circa-1880s building on the town square for 98 years. On Monday, about 50 Elks members finished up their dinner of grilled pork tenderloin on the second floor and prepared to go upstairs to initiate new members.
Tony Komer, the exalted ruler of the Elks Lodge, had already gone up to the third floor to practice his speech in the meeting room where members would gather for the ceremony.
Suddenly, there was a rumble, a crash, chaos.
Young and the others had no warning whatsoever. The floor dropped from under them at an angle and the roof crashed down on top of them.
Don Eaton went into a free fall, praying as the floor gave way.
He heard the shouts and screams of those who were able to escape, but then they subsided into quiet.
The men left behind called out, trying to account for each other in dusty caverns of tenuous safety. Some shafts of light from the setting sun broke through the rubble.
Walls, ceilings and broken tables formed lean-tos that kept the men from being crushed.
Eaton and the others didn’t know if they were going to make it or if the walls would cave in. They whispered for fear that even noise could bring more debris down on top of them.
The men could do little more than sit or crawl, two men were pinned under debris, one man suffered a severe head cut that bled until it finally clotted.
“We prayed a lot; we talked a lot,” Eaton recalled later. “We talked about what we were going to do when we got out. And we did everything we could to make sure nobody moved.”
A few men had cell phones and called their families. Eaton called his wife, who thought it was a practical joke. He assured her it was not.
Within minutes of the 7:30 p.m. disaster, emergency lights and sirens filled the streets outside the fallen building. People streamed to the square. Rescue crews, relatives of victims, people with loaders and lumber and hundreds of onlookers gathered as darkness approached on the cool summer evening.
From 300 to 500 volunteers showed up to help, Clinton Mayor Gus Wetzel later estimated.
But the job was beyond the abilities of local fire and emergency crews. Calls went out for assistance from city, county, state and federal agencies. Most in need: experts in getting the men out from what amounted to a potentially deadly house of cards.
Young put his trust in the rescuers.
“We were confident, except about an hour and a half in, when we had a pretty good shake in the building,” Young said later. It had just settled, but not enough to shrink their surroundings.
The trapped men could account for everyone but Komer. They called his name. There was no answer.
About 9:30 p.m., a flashlight shone down on the huddled men from above.
“Gentlemen, we’re here,” a voice called to them. “But it’s going to take awhile.”
At about 10 p.m., the specially trained Rescue 9 unit of the Kansas City Fire Department arrived on the scene. Formed about a year ago, the unit looked at the building from all angles to try to plot a rescue plan.
Capt. Chad Dailey of the Rescue 9 unit could tell this would not be a simple matter of clearing the debris off the men.
The building shifted while the firefighters were inside. Dailey saw a lot of lateral movement that was too much, too fast.
The best approach appeared to be through the wall of an adjacent building. Firefighters cut holes through the foot-thick brick wall and crawled through. Carefully they sawed through some of the debris and used lumber to shore up and stabilize the area.
Firefighters decided the best way to get the men out was from above, using ropes and harnesses to pull them up to a place where they could safely walk out. The first man, Young, got out at about 12:30 a.m., and six more followed in the next two or three hours.
Onlookers cheered as they departed, most of them to waiting ambulances.
But the two men pinned in the wreckage were harder to reach, much less free. When a way was cleared, a doctor administered an IV — but he was lower in the building, standing well below the trapped man.
Dailey was impressed. The doctor couldn’t even see his hands when he did it.
About 5:30 a.m., both of the last two men were carefully removed from the building.
Komer, however, was crushed in the collapse of the third floor, Dailey told a dozen reporters as Kansas City firefighters left for home about 7 a.m.
The loss of Komer, described as devoted to the Elks and his young family, was a tragedy, Eaton said. But many more men could have died in the collapse.
“Ten minutes later and all 50 guys would have been up on the third floor and probably would have been killed,” Eaton said. “Timing is everything in this world.”
As he stood on the town square Tuesday morning, just hours after his rescue, Eaton said the experience already seemed oddly distant.
“It seems like a decade ago,” Eaton said.
The Kansas City Star’s Sam Baker contributed to this report.