3/1/2024 0 Comments Joplin mo weather last night![]() The website of the local paper, the Joplin Globe, carried messages from people searching for loved ones.Īnd with phone services down, dazed survivors tried to make their way through streets blocked by debris to look for relatives. Nixon said he had reports of 15 missing elderly residents from a care home. "I still believe that because of the size of the debris and the number of people involved that there are lives to be saved."Īs rescue workers moved out to look for survivors in the rubble, fires from gas leaks burned across the city. "I don't think we are done counting," he told reporters.īut he said he remained hopeful of finding survivors in the rubble. 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. 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. ![]() 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.
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