After a week of long days, Joy Moser was supposed to head to bed early Thursday. But the Lawrence tornado ruined her plans.

The spokeswoman for the Adjutant General’s Office and her colleagues went back to work to respond to the newest disaster, just days after tornadoes struck Kansas City and southeast Kansas.

The rolling series of devastating storms is stretching the resources of the state’s emergency response officials.

“It’s our normal disaster mode. We’re all tired,” Moser said. “You need some time to recover, and we didn’t get time to recover.”

Rich Forney, administrator of the Salvation Army in Lawrence, agreed. He was in Kansas City on Thursday, assisting in the response to Sunday’s tornado there, when he heard about the tornado in Douglas County.

“I closed the warehouse and raced over,” Forney said.

Within hours, he was coordinating his agency’s response to the Lawrence tornado.

“I’ve been doing this over 30 years,” Forney said. “We just take one thing at a time and everything seems to work out just fine.”

Other agencies are helping, as well. Brad Finkeldei, president of the board of the Douglas County Chapter of the American Red Cross, said that 47 volunteers started Thursday night to assist in recovery efforts. And the Lawrence school district opened the Free State High School gymnasium as a shelter, though only one person used it.

The financial resources of public and private aid agencies aren’t exhausted, though some of their workers are. Moser said her agency still had power generators to spare, despite trucking one to a storm site after Sunday’s tornadoes.

“If we had to do everything ourselves, there’s no way we could do that,” she said. “But our job is to coordinate a variety of agencies in responding.”

And Salvation Army officials are soliciting help and money from the public to aid its efforts.

Forney said that the most-needed items were rakes, shovels, latex gloves, cleaning supplies and brushes. These items can be brought to the Salvation Army offices at 10th and New Hampshire streets.

Money also is needed, he said. Salvation Army distributed vouchers for rooms at local hotels and motels, and also bank accounts, charge accounts, groceries and items of immediate need were set up for some victims, as well.

People wanting to make gifts-in-kind to the Salvation Army should call (800) SAL-ARMY. People wanting to make cash donations to the Salvation Army to benefit local victims can call 843-4188. Red Cross donations can be made at 843-3550 or (800) HELPNOW.

“We try to comfort them, to console them,” Forney said. “We tell them what they have available to them.”

In her trip to Lawrence Friday afternoon, Gov. Kathleen Sebelius said her office didn’t know of major tornadoes so close together in time in the past few years.

“This scene is a little too familiar,” she said. “We live in Kansas and storms are a part of Kansas on a regular basis. But we haven’t had back-to-back storms like this in a long time.”

— Staff writer Joel Mathis can be reached at 832-7126; assistant multimedia managing editor Greg Hurd can be reached at 832-6372.

— Staff writer Terry Rombeck contributed to this report.