Nanda Nunnelly had just come home from a weekend out of town when a massive, multi-vortex tornado ripped through Joplin, Missouri on May 22, 2011. The sky, she says, had a sickly green tinge. When the tornado sirens went off, she jumped in a closet with her husband and dog.

“ Within just seconds… it was so loud that it was quiet,” remembers Nunnelly. While crouched in the closet, she wondered if the 200 mph winds would take her, and she started praying.

“If I’m dying, dear God, please don’t let it hurt,'” she remembers thinking.

Nunelly survived that day, but her house was destroyed, and a third of the city’s population was displaced. The tornado, recorded at three-quarters of a mile wide, was one of the deadliest in recorded U.S. history, taking nearly 160 lives.

But within months, Joplin became known not for its tragedy, but for the kindness and cooperation that led to its recovery. Traces of that community compassion still live on 15 years after the storm.

In the weeks after the tornado, almost 100,000 volunteers from nearly every state helped clean up debris and rebuild. Disaster researchers from Columbia University noted that six months later, there was “barely any polarization or political conflict” over the direction of the recovery. Schools reopened on time the following fall.

Darren Fullerton, who ran a Red Cross emergency shelter at Missouri Southern State University in Joplin after the tornado hit, still remembers the acts of kindness during those chaotic first weeks. Ranchers cooking steaks for volunteers. A university dean, who, after losing his own home, set up cots at an emergency shelter for others. Someone dressed up as a clown and made balloon animals for kids at the shelter.

“People came out of the woodwork,” Fullerton says.

Melodee Colbert-Kean, Joplin’s vice-mayor at the time, says the recovery took people out of their silos and helped them “remember that they’re human.”

“It didn’t matter what color you were, whether you were a … Republican, Democrat, independent, whatever,” she says. “You saw a need, and you tried to fill that need the best you could.”

Social psychologists like Jamil Zaki have a term for this: catastrophe compassion. Disasters spark an outpouring of kindness between strangers, overpowering any social barriers that existed before.

“After something terrible happens, people, instead of falling apart and focusing on themselves, come together and try to do for one another,” says Zaki, director of Stanford’s Social Neuroscience Lab and author of two books on kindness and empathy.

The prevailing misperception about disasters, he says, is that they bring out a dog-eat-dog mentality that leads to looting and criminal behavior.

Ordinarily humans are a “group-ish” species, and they put themselves into identity categories (i.e. “Christian” or “left-wing”). Those self-classifications may separate us from others in our day-to-day lives. But in a crisis like Joplin’s tornado, people can see themselves as a “survivor,” allowing them to make powerful bonds with others going through the same experience.

“ If you’re on a bus that gets bombed or you’re in a street that gets hit by a tornado, you suddenly have a lot in common with the people who are right next to you,” says Zaki. “You’re part of a tribe that you might not have chosen to join, but one that unites you really powerfully.”

Altruism born of suffering

As Nanda Nunnelly crouched in her daughter’s closet during the tornado, she watched fragments of broken glass swirl around the room.

“It looked like fairy dust,” she remembers.

In those moments, when she thought she might die, a face flashed before her eyes. But it wasn’t any of her family members. It was the face of a girl she bullied in 8th grade.

“I’m like, ‘Oh my God, I never got to tell her I’m sorry.'”

After the storm, she moved to a nearby town. But the vision she had of the girl she bullied still nagged her. She apologized to her in a long personal message on Facebook.

“It was like, ‘I have to do this,'” Nunnelly remembers. “ When you truly think you’re going to die, it’s really strange the things that come into your head.”

When Nunnelly moved back to Joplin five years later, she joined the board of a local community center, which now shelters unhoused people during certain extreme weather events. The motivation to “give back” was almost visceral.

“ I don’t know how anyone could go through that… and not think about how can I help the next person, you know?” Nunnelly says.

Outside the context of collective trauma, psychologists theorize that personal hardships can germinate into do-good behaviors later on, especially if the individual was the recipient of help during their struggle.

Zaki says the concept of altruism born of suffering may explain Nunnelly’s actions, and why people who have struggled with addiction become addiction counselors, for instance, or veterans help other veterans.

“ When we experience some type of pain, it’s almost like we have an easier time accessing that suffering in other people and a stronger desire to do something about it,” says Zaki.

Keeping the compassion going

Jane Cage remembers those first weeks after the 2011 Joplin tornado, when church groups showed up with chainsaws to cut fallen trees, and Harley Davidson riders lined up at Walmart to buy school supplies for local kids.

Those memories, she says, still create a shared identity among Joplin’s tornado survivors, to such an extent that people who have moved to Joplin in the past 15 years can “feel like outsiders.”

“It’s almost like we can speak in shorthand about everything that happened. You have to learn a new language,” says Cage. who volunteered as chairman for Joplin’s Citizens Advisory Recovery Team after the tornado.

“There is an invisible bond between us. We have a deeper understanding of one another,” she says.

Some research has shown that the “altruistic communities” that pop up after disasters are short-lived, fading just a few months after the defining trauma has fizzled.

“Once they are out of that situation, their personal identities may become more meaningful to them than these new group identities,” says John Drury, professor of social psychology at the University of Sussex in the U.K.

But both Zaki and Drury say the ethos of solidarity and mutual aid can be kept alive through concerted efforts like group meetings and commemorations.

A few years after the storm, residents used philanthropic recovery money to form an organization, One Joplin, to continue the community collaboration.

The group now works to serve the needs of Joplin’s working poor, and advocates for more affordable housing.

“It’s evolved over the years,” says Nicole Brown, executive director of One Joplin. “Really at its heart is just to continue that … sense of community and sense of connection and commonality of wanting a better community for all.”

Jay St. Clair, a minister who turned his church into a shelter for nursing home residents after the storm and worked 18-hour days thereafter, is still running the marathon of community service.

“From day one we coalesced around ‘we’re better together,'” says St. Clair, who now directs a transitional housing program called God’s Resort. He says working people were struggling before the 2011 tornado, but now there’s a sharper focus on meeting their needs.

“After the tornado, we had to see things that we didn’t want to see before,” he says.

Zaki says a lot of his work is also getting people to see how widespread “catastrophe compassion” actually is.

During the pandemic, Zaki’s lab asked 1,000 Americans whether they thought the COVID-19 pandemic made people kinder. More than half surveyed said that it hadn’t. But Zaki says, the exact opposite was true. Data from 150 countries shows that acts of kindness went up across the board, from volunteering, to making donations to helping a stranger.

“Disasters do reveal our true colors, but more often than not, those are dazzling,” says Zaki.

Pauline Bartolone is journalist based in the San Francisco Bay area and is a grantee of the UC Berkeley Greater Good Science Center‘s “Spreading Love Through the Media” initiative, supported by the John Templeton Foundation.

You can hear the full story of how Nanda Nunnelly survived the Joplin tornado, and reconciled with the girl she bullied as a child on This is Actually Happening.