Joplin’s EF-5 tornado destroyed 3,000 homes and an entire hospital
The tornado that struck Joplin, Missouri, in May 2011 remains one of the strongest observed in modern history
Joplin, Missouri, still hasn’t fully recovered from the devastating tornado that struck the city on May 22, 2011.
The scale-topping EF-5 twister killed 161 people in 13 minutes as it swept through the small city on the Plains, making it the most devastating storm to strike since the advent of early warning systems.
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Tornadoes ran rampant across the United States in 2011. That spring saw multiple destructive outbreaks sweep through the southern and central portions of the country.
A strong cold front crashed into a slug of warm, unstable air parked over the Plains, providing the trigger needed for severe thunderstorms to erupt.
One dominant supercell thunderstorm tracked out of Kansas and into southwestern Missouri just after 5:00 p.m. local time on Sunday, May 22. The storm’s rotation intensified and meteorologists issued a tornado warning for Joplin and the surrounding areas.
The tornado touched down at 5:34 p.m. and quickly grew in both size and strength as the storm tracked into Joplin’s city limits.
Maximum winds exceeded 320 km/h as the EF-5 tornado churned through neighbourhoods on the southern side of Joplin. The strongest winds in most twisters occur along a tiny portion of their overall paths. But the Joplin tornado was significantly larger.
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The swath of EF-4 to EF-5 damage measured many times bigger than the entire width of an average tornado. According to one engineering analysis, the storm damaged or destroyed around 7,500 homes and knocked down about 10,000 trees.
Intense winds swept many homes clean from their foundations, offering no hope for survival even among some folks who took proper safety precautions. The tornado killed 161 people and injured at least 1,000 others.
Many survivors sought help at the St. John’s Regional Medical Center, which itself had taken a severe hit from the storm. The multi-storey hospital suffered so much structural damage that the entire building had to be torn down and rebuilt.
Given the complete and thorough destruction in the hardest-hit areas, meteorologists and engineers had to rely on context clues to assign an EF-5 rating. Some of this unconventional damage included concrete parking blocks and steel manhole covers ripped from the ground and tossed long distances.
All told, the active weather in 2011 produced more than 1,700 tornadoes which claimed 553 lives across the United States. Six of those tornadoes were rated EF-5, including the one that devastated Joplin.
Header image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Intelati.