Missouri's governor, Jay Nixon, said he feared the death toll would rise as rescue workers began searching the rubble for survivors and bodies. "I couldn't even make out the side of the building. That's really what it looked like," Kerry Sachetta, the principal of a flattened Joplin high school, told reporters. "You see pictures of world war two, the devastation and all that with the bombing. Those able to walk were taken to a makeshift ward at a community centre.Īcross the southern end of town, an estimated 2,000 buildings were damaged, street signs and other landmarks vanished, rendering Joplin unrecognisable to residents who had spent their lives there. The seriously ill were transported out of town to other hospitals. Officials said the hospital was now unusable. "Cars are tumbled all over the parking lot." "Every window in that building is now broken," Melodee Colbert-Kean, a city council woman, told National Public Radio. A helicopter was hurled out of the landing pad and flipped on its side, its rotors a twisted wreck. Trolleys were tossed more than five city blocks away, and medical records and x-rays were scattered for 60 miles. The ceiling of the emergency room caved in.
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But rescue workers told reporters that many of the patients had been cut by glass after the windows were blown out. Within 90 minutes, the hospital was empty. Some patients were evacuated on pick-up trucks. Nurses told of desperate attempts to move patients away from windows and into enclosed hallways. They had about 20 minutes before the black funnel cloud descended, hovering over the hospital for about a minute. At least five of the 116 dead were killed at the hospital.Ībout 180 patients were in the hospital when the warning sirens went off, witnesses said.
The nine-storey building, the tallest in town, took a direct hit. Some of the worst destruction was at St John's Regional Medical Centre. We've lost tonnes and tonnes of homes, and we have people out trying to uncover the dead right now." "The trees," he told National Public Radio, "they're like somebody's taken a knife and cut all the bark off of them. The former mayor, Gary Shaw, described the scene in the town of 50,000 as a war zone. The town's fire department estimated up to a third of buildings were damaged or destroyed. The twister cut a six-mile swath through the centre of the town, wrecking churches, schools, businesses and homes. Sunday night's tornado was the deadliest since 1953, and the second tornado disaster in the US in less than a month. A new tornado watch was issued on Monday night for the areas around Joplin, as well as Oklahoma and parts of Kansas and Texas.
The authorities warned the death toll could rise.Īnd there was no immediate end in sight. Tornado EF-5 In Joplin - kspr.The rescue effort once again pitched humans against the elements, as emergency crews equipped with axes and torches worked their way through rubble looking for survivors, lashed by strong winds and occasional hail. The survivors were sent to other places Arkansas, Oklahoma and Kansas. He said ten patients and a staff member were killed in the tornado. Bill Mitchell operates the Greenbriar nursing home. The Associated Press is reporting that eleven of the people killed were in one nursing home. Sunday's tornado was the deadliest single twister in the United States since the 1950s. That means it has two or more small and intense "subvortices" that orbit a larger circulation. Video shows Sunday's tornado was what experts call a "multivortex" tornado. The National Weather Service says the tornado appears to also have had more than one vortex. Officials warned people to watch the weather. A couple of tornado sirens in Joplin were destroyed in the tornado, so the area hit by the tornado will be notified of severe weather by a public address system. 1,500 people are missing, but officials say some of these people may have been out of the area when the storm hit.ĮF-5 tornadoes are storms with winds greater than 200 miles an hour.īad weather is expected in the area Tuesday evening. Two people were rescued Tuesday from debris. In a news conference Tuesday evening, officials announced that the Joplin tornado is now rated as an EF-5.
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