Rescue crews dug through piles of splintered houses and crushed cars Monday in a search for victims of a half-mile-wide tornado that killed at least 116 people when it blasted much of this Missouri town off the map and slammed straight into its hospital.
It was the nation's deadliest single tornado in nearly 60 years and the second major tornado disaster in less than a month.
Authorities feared the toll could rise as the full scope of the destruction comes into view: House after house reduced to slabs, cars crushed like soda cans, shaken residents roaming streets in search of missing family members. And the danger was by no means over. Fires from gas leaks burned across town, and more violent weather loomed, including the threat of hail, high winds and even more tornadoes.
My prayers are with the people of Joplin and all affected by the devastating destruction and this terrible loss of life.
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More death and destruction from a massive tornado.
From KNOX, via the Associated Press:
A massive tornado that blasted a four-mile path across southwestern Missouri slammed into this city with cataclysmic force, ripping into a hospital, upending cars and leaving only a forest of splintered tree trunks behind where entire neighborhoods once stood.
An unknown number were killed in Joplin on Sunday night, and officials struggling to communicate without power and cellphone service were leery of putting a hard figure on a death toll they feared would rise after daybreak. Asked about a report that 24 people had died, city spokeswoman Lynn Onstot said grimly that officials were “afraid it may be more. … Our fear is that’s a low number.” The Missouri National Guard planned to search for the injured throughout the night. “You see pictures of World War II, the devastation and all that with the bombing. That’s really what it looked like,” said Kerry Sachetta, the principal of a flattened Joplin High School. “I couldn’t even make out the side of the building. It was total devastation in my view. I just couldn’t believe what I saw.”
The same storm system that produced the Joplin tornado spawned twisters along a broad swath of the Midwest, from Oklahoma to Wisconsin. At least one person was killed in Minneapolis. But the devastation in Missouri appeared to be the worst of the day, eerily reminiscent the tornadoes that killed more than 300 people across the South last month. Onstot said the twister __ believed to be between one-half to three-quarters of a mile wide __ was on the ground for nearly four miles. It hit a hospital packed with patients and a commercial area including a Home Depot construction store, numerous smaller businesses and restaurants and a grocery store. Jasper County emergency management director Keith Stammer said an estimated 2,000 buildings were damaged in this city of about 50,000 people some 160 miles south of Kansas City.
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