Her car was swept off a road in a blinding rainstorm late Monday evening and she would spend hours fighting to stay alive.
Two days later, she was huddled in a friend’s shelter as a tornado tore through her neighborhood, flattening homes.
Call it a divine test of will.
“I’ve always had a strong faith in God and I feel like each situation he keeps putting me through is just a way to make me stronger and be able to help others through this,” Rogers, 18, said Friday at her home.
Cities across much of the central United States were on edge Saturday, days after thunderstorms and tornadoes strafed parts of the Midwest and South. Several rivers and tributaries have flooded neighboring communities. Rogers has lived through it all.
The tornado Wednesday was not even her first. Eight years earlier, she and her father were caught in the tornado in Joplin, Missouri, which killed 161 people and leveled a third of the city. Her home demolished, Rogers, then 10 years old, took shelter from hail and driving rain in a destroyed car.
But the whirlwinds did not compare with her struggle in a raging creek in heavy rains and wind on Monday.
After Rogers got off work at a Joplin television station, she told her co-workers to be careful as they headed home, knowing that the area was under severe thunderstorm warnings. About 11 p.m., she was driving in darkness and pouring rain about a mile north of Joplin when her car — a Jeep she had bought just two weeks earlier — began hydroplaning.
“I can’t see anything, and of course I wouldn’t have driven even in a little water if I had seen it,” Rogers said. She had driven onto a low-water bridge that had not yet been barricaded.
“My Jeep is heavy, but it starts floating. So I rolled down the window and jumped out. And while I’m jumping out, I’m calling my mother and saying, ‘Mom, my Jeep is floating away, I don’t know what to do, help me, call the police.’”
A co-worker of Rogers’, Mason Corl, was driving close behind her since he lived nearby, and his car was also caught in the floodwaters.
After she abandoned her car, the raging current took her to Corl’s car, where she took shelter until it started filling with water. They climbed onto the roof.
“He was on the phone with 911, and I’m on the phone with my mom as we were getting on top of the roof,” Rogers said. “The last thing I said to my mom was, ‘Please be praying, I think we’re going to die, I love you.’”
They decided to abandon the car, afraid that the current would flip it over and that they would be dragged under. When Corl jumped, he was swept away immediately, Rogers said. (He would later be rescued.)
She jumped into the water. Immediately she hit her head on a tree, but was able to secure a tree limb that was floating by and hung on. After floating about 2 1/2 miles downstream from where her car had been dragged into the water, she grabbed onto another tree and eventually scrambled onto a small island in the middle of the flooded Turkey Creek, where she took shelter until the sun came up.
“I thought, Oh my goodness, thank you, Jesus, I’m safe,” Rogers said.
At daylight, she was looking for a way off the island when she spotted a man in a truck on the bank and shouted for help. He called 911 and alerted emergency responders who had been searching all night for Rogers.
Her mother, Courtnee Eaton, had been hysterical with grief most of the night and had all but given up hope that rescuers would find her daughter alive.
That morning, Eaton, 51, was standing with relatives and friends some distance from the river when a Jasper County sheriff’s deputy approached them with a stoic face.
“He said, ‘Your daughter has been found alive,’ and we all just lost it,” Eaton said in an interview Friday. “We fell into each other’s arms and prayed and said thank you to God.”
Rogers was taken to a hospital where she was treated for hypothermia and exposure. She said doctors had removed 15 thorns from her feet.
Her ordeal on Monday night made what happened on Wednesday seem anti-climactic. Again, it was late and forecasters had been predicting severe weather all day.
When Carl Junction was put under a severe thunderstorm warning, Eaton and Rogers drove a few blocks to the home of a friend, Judd McPherson, who had a tornado shelter.
The three of them and five others, along with three dogs, hid in the small concrete shelter as the whirlwind made quick work of houses nearby.
McPherson’s home was severely damaged, but they all made it out alive. That tornado would continue northeast through Jasper County and about 40 miles to Golden City, Missouri, where it would kill three people.
Eaton said her daughter was gaining something of a reputation. Rogers’ aunt called her a cat.
“OK, you’ve had two of your nine lives,” Eaton said. “Olivia says, ‘I really don’t want to know what the other seven are going to be like.’”