![]() ![]() Was this tornado, by far the most devastating natural disaster the area had ever experienced, part of a pattern? Was climate change causing this insane weather? For years I had been hearing unnerving weather reports from back home: news of 70-degree days in January, of droughts followed by floods followed by droughts, of ice storms causing power outages not seen in the area since the advent of electricity. Did forecasters give people enough notice? Did the satellite and radar systems work as designed? Did anyone pay attention? I was more interested in the cause of the storm itself. In the aftermath of the tornado, citizens, reporters and government officials scrutinized the warning system and promised to find out what went wrong. Home Depot said that its Joplin store, which was demolished in the storm, was built properly and that no building could have survived the tornado-but it also said the company will be adding an underground storm shelter to its new store. A larger-than-average percentage of the deaths caused by the Joplin tornado happened in commercial buildings, including big-box retail stores. ![]() Houses are frequently built on slab foundations, with no basement in which to ride out a tornado. Plenty of homes and businesses get built that would have a hard time withstanding the atmospheric strains of a terrarium. Building codes, meanwhile, aren’t written with storms even remotely as strong as the May 22 tornado in mind. A century ago, Joplin covered 12.5 square miles. As towns like Joplin have grown, subdivisions sprawling into soybean fields, they have become larger targets. But adaptation and instruction can only do so much. The citizens of Tornado Alley towns like Joplin long ago adapted to the region’s abusive weather by assembling warning systems, building shelters, and instructing children in siren interpretation and shelter taking from the earliest days of elementary school. The tornado that swept through Joplin last year destroyed 6,954 houses and killed 161 people, in 32 minutes. As a result, the Joplin tornado is the deadliest single tornado on record. But because the Tri-State tornado (and the other five storms responsible for more deaths than the Joplin tornado) happened before the invention of modern weather-monitoring instruments, it’s unclear whether they involved single funnel clouds or entire swarms. The worst was the Tri-State tornado of March 18, 1925, which in three and a half hours killed 695 people in Missouri, Illinois and Indiana. That doesn’t quite make it the deadliest tornado in history. The tornado destroyed 20 percent of the property in Joplin, killed 161 people, and injured 1,150 more, all in a town with just 49,000 residents. One continuous stream of demolition connected them all. Nonetheless, it wasn’t until the morning that we realized that the damage reports that had been streaming in over Facebook weren’t isolated. Throughout the evening it became obvious that the storm was extraordinarily severe. No phone calls were getting through, but our parents texted back quickly: They were fine, and so were their homes. Same goes for my wife, another Joplin native. I haven’t lived in Joplin since I left for college, but my parents, grandparents, and plenty of aunts, uncles, cousins and old friends still live in the area. We started calling, texting, posting urgent Facebook messages asking family and friends for information. At 5:41, the National Weather Service office in Springfield, Missouri, issued this alert: NUMEROUS REPORTS OF TORNADO ON THE GROUND WEST OF JOPLIN AND POWER FLASHES. As it touched the ground, it filled with sparks from ruptured power lines, like a jar of fireflies. A dark blob half a mile wide congealed and dropped from the clouds. Almost as quickly as they formed, the tendrils disappeared. Just after 5 p.m., two storm chasers driving toward the western edge of Joplin, Missouri, spotted a translucent set of tendrils reaching down from the storm’s low black thunderhead. ![]() Dense white vapors poured from nothing, and over the next five hours the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration monitored the growing supercell thunderstorm as it drifted toward a three-letter abbreviation on the map: “JLN.” At around 2 p.m, one of the cloud lines exploded, like a cartographic-scale dry-ice bomb. On May 22, 2011, a geostationary satellite 22,300 miles overhead recorded a large collection of cloud lines drifting over southeastern Kansas. The tornado that destroyed my hometown was born in an otherwise unremarkable atmospheric collision over the American Central Plains. ![]()
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