![]() A couple of houses down? Not so bad for late May in southwest Missouri. At first we thought the crew was filming outside of town, in the country. Mike Bettes, one of the network’s on-camera meteorologists, was standing in a field of debris, talking to dazed Joplinites whose homes had just been leveled. Still, we moved to the couch and turned on the Weather Channel. Growing up in Joplin means growing up with tornado warnings, so I was certain this was yet another false alarm. Her sister called: There had been a tornado, and it sounded bad. My wife and I were eating dinner at home in Brooklyn when we heard the news. But when it reached the open pasture at Joplin’s eastern edge, the tornado-as if it had been fueled by manmade structures and was now depleted-delivered a few dying spasms and vanished. Meteorologists watching radar screens at a safe remove now saw a white-pink blob representing the tornado’s swirl of debris swing through the rest of the city like a wrecking ball. It continued toward the main thoroughfare, Range Line Road, and destroyed a Home Depot, an Academy Sports & Outdoors, a Wal-Mart and a Pizza Hut, shotgunning shoppers with glass and metal and wood, burying some beneath cinder blocks, and needling others with blades of grass. It shaved away the neighborhood just east of the high school, including the little white one-story house where I spent my teenage years. The tornado churned on to the east, tagging its path with bizarre signatures-wood piercing asphalt, rubber piercing wood. Most of the damaged areas were unrecognizable even to lifelong residents. The exact same neighborhood, pictured the day after the deadliest single tornado in modern history. Inside, chairs and papers swarmed as the walls began to collapse. Security cameras intended to monitor lunch-hour skippers now recorded surges of water that rendered the parking lot indistinguishable from a harbor in a hurricane. After gnawing through half a dozen intervening residential blocks, the tornado hit Joplin High School, a recently refurbished brick complex at the town’s middle-class core. As it tacked slightly to the north, it flattened a downtrodden swath of old Main Street. In 45 seconds, it shifted the nine-story structure four inches off its foundation.īy then, the tornado was three quarters of a mile wide. John’s Hospital, one of the region’s major medical centers. The tornado produced a good deal of incredible, EF-5-worthy damage in the office park that surrounded St. When the storm hit Joplin, the winds inside the funnel were spinning faster than 200 mph-yet the whole column was crawling forward at less than 10 mph, giving it time to wood-chip everything beneath it. An EF-4 is powerful enough to scrape civilization off the planet in a matter of minutes. ![]() Unlike EF-4s, which are merely “devastating,” EF-5s produce “incredible” damage. By the time it reached the city limits, where 49,000 people lived, it had evolved into an EF-5, the most destructive type of tornado on the Enhanced Fujita scale. “The tornado, as if it had been fueled by manmade structures and was now depleted, vanished.”The tornado intensified as it strafed the roofs and treetops of Joplin’s western suburbs. ![]() 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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