JOPLIN, Mo. WHEATLAND, Pa. As they dig out, tornado victims in the South and Midwest might find it hard to see past the wreckage of their communities to a future in which homes and businesses are rebuilt and life is back to normal.

Maxine "Sis" Cluse knows how they feel. She lost everything she owned exactly 26 years ago, when the deadliest U.S. tornado outbreak between 1974 and this catastrophic season nearly flattened her hometown of Wheatland.

Her simple advice to tornado victims: "You can't give up."

Today, a visitor would be hard-pressed to detect any physical sign of the twister that wrecked Wheatland on May 31, 1985. The same goes for Niles, a town just over the state line in Ohio that was changed forever by the same tornado.

If there's a lesson to be learned, it's that communities are resilient. And that rebuilding, however slow, fitful, frustrating and expensive, will probably take place, though what emerges will not necessarily be a carbon copy of what was there before.

The calamity that devastated Niles and Wheatland has become an important part of both cities' lore. More than a generation removed from a tornado outbreak in three states and Canada that killed about 90 people, survivors still talk about what it was like.

The monster funnel wrecked three miles of Niles before slamming into Wheatland. But though they fell victim to the same tornado, the towns took different paths to recovery.

In Wheatland, the storm killed eight residents, leveled most of the town's industrial base and left 400 people homeless in the rough-and-tumble Flats section near the Shenango River.

Wheatland rebuilt, but it wasn't the same. Modern zoning precluded the kind of industrial-residential mix that had emerged gradually over many decades in the Flats, and the town council voted to turn the entire neighborhood into a 60-acre industrial park.

The new industrial park welcomed several specialty steel companies, a trucking firm, a storage business, a machine shop and a manufacturer of cylinder caps.

But most of the displaced residents never came back to Wheatland, and couldn't even if they wanted to because of a lack of housing and room to build. By 1990, the town's population had plummeted by hundreds of residents to 760.

"Wheatland has changed a lot. We lost half of our residents. But we're still a close-knit community," said Sharon Stinedurf, the town's secretary.

A small memorial in the industrial park marks the devastating path of the tornado.

About 15 miles to the west in Niles, the tornado killed nine people, destroyed 100 homes and businesses, and damaged 250 more. The economic loss totaled more than $60 million.

Tom Telego, the city's business manager and director of emergency management, said it took the city five years to fully recover. Population loss, now at 19,000, was minimal. Most businesses rebuilt; the ones that didn't were replaced by other businesses.

He said the rebuilding effort was helped by a sense of shared purpose.

In Tuscaloosa, Ala., a much larger city where 41 people died and more than 5,000 homes were damaged or destroyed on April 27 this year, a 50-member task force is already putting together a long-term recovery plan. Everything's on the table - stricter building standards, improved infrastructure, even aesthetics.

Mayor Walt Maddox said the task force and members of his staff are reaching out to other cities and towns that have rebuilt from disaster. "How did they move forward? What did they do right, and what are some lessons learned?"

For answers, Tuscaloosa might look to Xenia, Ohio, where a monster tornado in April 1974 killed 33 residents and leveled more than 1,000 homes and businesses.

Business leaders and politicians argued over how to rebuild downtown, and five years passed before developers broke ground on a strip shopping center that replaced quaint brick storefronts.

"At the time it seemed like a great concept because they were trying to re-energize the downtown," said Tim Sontag, owner of a shoe store. "But it lost some of the qualities of a good downtown."

Alan King, who owns a child care center, gives this advice to those just starting to rebuild: "Don't rush just to fill space. ... Do something that will give you a vibrant community down the line."