"You could hear our computers and things just whipping by us." "It was like a train coming through the facility and the wind was so great," she said. John's, told NPR's Michele Norris that she was in the triage department of the emergency room when the twister struck. precious few minutes to get out into the parking lot, to get people in the safety corridor of the hospital."Īngie Abner, a paramedic and an emergency room nurse at St. "Cars are tumbled all over the parking lot. "Every window in that building is now broken," City Councilwoman Melodee Colbert-Kean told NPR. Nearby, a pile of cars lay crumpled into a single mass of twisted metal. In the parking lot, a helicopter lay crushed on its side, its rotors torn apart and windows smashed. The staff had just minutes' notice to hustle patients into hallways before the storm struck the nine-story building, blowing out hundreds of windows and leaving the hospital useless. But the devastation in Missouri was the worst of the day, reminiscent of the tornadoes that killed more than 300 people across the South last month.Īmong the worst-hit locations in Joplin was St. The Joplin twister was one of 68 reported tornadoes across seven Midwest states over the weekend, from Oklahoma to Wisconsin, according to the National Weather Service's Storm Prediction Center. People were forced to weather the assault in bathrooms and bathtubs. Closer to the tornado zone, it simply looked as if the town had been chewed up in a blender and spit out across miles.įire chief Mitch Randles estimated that as much as one-third of the city was damaged, and said his own home was among the buildings destroyed as the twister swept through this city of about 50,000 people some 160 miles south of Kansas City.įormer Mayor Gary Shaw said Joplin looked like a war zone.Įmergency sirens went off 20 minutes before the tornado hit, but many of the homes in the area, built in the 1960s, do not have basements. To one observer approaching the town Monday, evidence of the wreckage began with obvious debris amid an eerie calm on the outskirts of town. One man retrieved a file cabinet from a crawlspace that opened to reveal a treasure chest of personal papers. Some survivors searched for what could be salvaged from homes that seemed totally destroyed. Heavy equipment helped move some debris while volunteers wearing gloves picked through more fragile scenes of destruction. The search was on for survivors Monday, with more than 1,500 volunteers helping police, firefighters and other first responders. And in the end, that’s what Weather-Ready Nation is all about – saving lives.Even people who've lived here for years and years are having trouble finding their way around because the street signs are gone and nothing looks familiar. Jack Hayes go into detail on how new technologies will help increase lead times and save more lives. Jane Lubchenco and National Weather Service Director Dr. In this month’s edition of Scientific American, NOAA Administrator Dr. The work of the entire weather and emergency management community – from the National Conversation to nationwide radar upgrades to pilot projects to new public alert methods – is driven by a desire to make sure the tragic impacts of the tornadoes in 2011 are never repeated. Tragedies like this fuel the resolve to build a Weather-Ready Nation. 2011 was the fourth deadliest tornado year in U.S. The Joplin tornado is the deadliest since modern record keeping began in 1950 and is ranked 7th among the deadliest tornadoes in U.S. This storm along with others generated additional tornadoes, wind damage and flash flooding across far southwest Missouri. On a hot and humid Sunday afternoon on May 22, 2011, a supercell thunderstorm tracked from extreme southeast Kansas into far southwest Missouri ( NWS Springfield, County Warning Area). This storm produced an EF-5 (greater than 200 mph) tornado over Joplin, Mo., resulting in 158 fatalities and over 1000 injured in the Joplin area.
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