Besides chaos, John Decker also found an amazing sense of resiliency in Joplin, Mo.

The mixture of emotions stemmed from his experience in a town devastated by a three-quarter-mile-wide tornado May 22.

Decker, a registered nurse at Decker’s Family Care, trained with the Red Cross to assist victims of the tornado that killed more than 100 people and leveled thousands of buildings.

Decker is a volunteer with the Medical Reserve Corps and had already received his training and credentials to help in such a disaster. Joplin wasn’t his first disaster response. He also assisted following the 2009 floods in North Dakota.

But this assignment felt different from his previous disaster-response experience, he said.

“There was so much horrific violence with this tornado,” he said.

Indeed, reports of patients being removed from St. John’s Regional Medical Center on planks of wood after the building was hit and shoppers being trapped under collapsed roofs of businesses have been played out in the national spotlight in the weeks that followed.

“It was just like an ocean, just as far as you can see — debris,” Decker summed. “There was devastation you can’t imagine until you’re sitting in the middle of it.”

The eerie silence as he surveyed the damage on his first days is one of the sensations that will long stick with him. “You could hear your heart beat.”

“It was a miracle more people were not killed,” he said.

He arrived June 6 in Joplin and recovery, clean-up and humanitarian efforts were already well underway. He and a group of medical personnel and volunteers searched for those in need of medical assistance during his first days.

Particularly touching, he said, was a little girl who gave him a teddy bear for bandaging up other kids in one of the homes he visited.

“It would just rip your heart out,” he said.

He was later assigned to provide medical care at a shelter set up for tornado victims. He intended to stay two weeks, but added one more week to help set up another shelter. When he first arrived, 132 people were staying in the same shelter he slept in every night. When he left, only 30 people sought a place to stay at the shelter.

Decker said he is most impressed with the resiliency and sense of community exhibited by the residents of the Midwestern town.

Residents looked to their neighbors and those in surrounding communities for most of the resources that were needed to survive after much of the town was destroyed.

Decker is among many from across the country to respond to the disaster. Clean-up and rebuilding efforts are still underway more than a month later.

He said that the volunteers, including the Red Cross with which he assisted, provided unimaginable assistance. He encourages anyone who is able to volunteer or donate to such organizations.

“It was such a privilege and honor to work with the team I got to work with,” Decker said. “But any positive outcomes are because of the resilience of the city of Joplin.”

But Decker said there was a huge change seen during the three weeks he was there. “The city was alive again,” he said. Folks were shopping, housing arrangements were being made, and more day-to-day operations began returning.

“There is still a lot of work to do ... but there is progress being made,” he said.

Decker said this trip has reinspired him to continue the work he said he was taught to do by his parents. A call from flood-ridden Minot, N.D., may have him traveling there in the near future, he said.

“It is always natural for me to help people in need,” he said.