AccuWeather
It’s been 10 years since the deadly Joplin tornado
Ten years ago, Joplin, Missouri, was devastated by an enormous and powerful tornado — which set records that still stand today. On the afternoon on May 22, 2011, a supercell thunderstorm began making its way from southeastern Kansas into southwestern Missouri, where the city of Joplin is located. With it came what is now known as “the Joplin tornado” as well as additional tornadoes, wind damage and flash flooding. On the Friday leading up to the tornado, which occurred on a Sunday, the National Weather Service (NWS) issued a hazardous weather outlook. At 1:30 p.m. on the day of the tornado, NWS forecasters issued a tornado watch, and then at 5:17 p.m. they issued a tornado warning with 17 minutes to spare before it touched down. In this May 22, 2011, file photo residents walk in the street after a massive tornado hit Joplin, Mo. A sky-darkening storm was working its way into southwest Missouri around dinnertime on a Sunday evening of May 22, 2011, zeroing in on the city of Joplin. (AP Photo/Mike Gullett, File) Former AccuWeather Senior Vice President and Chief Innovation Executive Mike Smith was driving to his home in Wichita, Kansas, when he witnessed the formation of the tornado firsthand. “As I was driving back home to Wichita, I could see the thunderstorms over Joplin, which is unusual,” Smith recalled in an interview with AccuWeather. “They looked unusually large and violent.” Smith said that when his eyes landed on that sight, which he was viewing from quite a distance, he knew he would need to go home and turn on the news to find out what was going on in Joplin. “The thunderstorm was 135 miles away yet it looked remarkably clear,” he said. The next day he caught a flight to AccuWeather’s headquarters in State College, Pennsylvania, so he was not able to stay in the loop with the latest information on the tornado. When he got off the plane, news reports were saying that the death toll had reached the 60s — a death toll Smith said was “unheard of” from a single tornado in the era of tornado warnings. “I was astonished. Absolutely astonished,” Smith said. The Joplin tornado was rated an EF5, the highest intensity on the Enhanced Fujita Scale with wind speeds surpassing 200 mph. EF5 tornadoes account for less than 1% of all tornadoes that occur, and one has not occurred in the U.S. in five years. The tornado that struck Joplin on that Sunday afternoon in 2011 caused a total of 161 fatalities and over 1,000 additional injuries — making it the deadliest in modern-day recorded history, which dates back to 1950. In all of U.S. history, the tornado is ranked seventh-deadliest and 2011 was the fourth-deadliest year for tornadoes in U.S. history. The tornado itself was up to a mile wide, and the length of its path was 22 miles. The massive twister was on the ground for 38 minutes. “It is rare for a tornado to remain on the ground for that length of time,” Steve Runnels, warning coordination meteorologist for the NWS in Springfield, Missouri, told AccuWeather. CLICK HERE FOR THE FREE ACCUWEATHER APP Making matters worse, at times the tornado was moving at just 15 miles per hour, leaving a lot of time for it to cause destruction as it roared across the Joplin landscape. “You’ve got a spinning, destructive tornado with 200-mile-per-hour winds taking so long to move through a given area,” Runnels said. “It’s easy to see why we had destruction.” AccuWeather Senior Meteorologist Bob Smerbeck said the tornado resulted in severe damage, especially to the local hospital, which took a direct hit. (NOAA map) Ten years later, many in Joplin still carry scars from the ordeal — both literal and figurative. One of those people scarred by the terror of that day is Mason Lillard, who was 10 at the time. Lillard was trapped inside a truck in the parking lot of a Home Depot when the massive twister tore through. Her grandfather was inside the store shopping and, as chaos from the storm erupted, he was trapped inside the building while Lillard, her grandmother and her young cousin all waited in the car. The storm struck fast. “We started praying, and I felt something touch my shoulder, and I looked up and thought it was my cousin,” Lillard, now 20 years old, told FOX 4 Kansas City in a recent interview. “And I looked up and there was two angels in the backseat, one by me and one by him.” Lillard said the tornado then lifted the truck into the air. “I looked up and saw a two-by-four flying around in circles and saw we were inside the tornado,” she recalled. Her cousin, Lage Grigsby, was thrown from the vehicle, which was toppled onto its side, and he suffered injuries that left him temporarily paralyzed. Lillard survived and in the days following the tragedy was dubbed the “miracle kid” by local media for somehow making it out alive. “She’s our feel-good story,” Jeff Reeves said at the time. He led the rescue crew that pulled her from the debris in the Home Depot parking lot after the storm. But Lillard did not escape unscathed. She was impaled by an iron rod that nearly killed her. “I had a one-inch piece of angle iron go through my right shoulder, broke seven ribs, puncture my lower lung and come out my back, a quarter-inch from my spine and a quarter-inch from my liver,” she told FOX 4. The miraculous nature of her survival is not lost on Lillard. “I honestly thought I was going to die. I really did,” she said, adding, “God saved me for a purpose.” Lillard, who said she underwent 13 surgeries in the wake of her injuries, believes that purpose is to help others when they’re in need and, according to FOX 4, is studying to be an EMT. According to The National Institute of Standards and Technology, 553 business structures and nearly 7,500 homes were damaged to some extent from the tornado. More than 3,000 homes were considered either heavily damaged or destroyed. The damages totaled to nearly $3 billion, making the Joplin tornado the costliest tornado in recorded U.S. history as well. The day was unseasonably warm in the Joplin area. The temperature shot up to 83 in Springfield, Missouri, which is located nearly 70 miles east. The high was 6 degrees above the normal high of 77 for the date. At the same time, much cooler air was pressing in from the north and west. The collision of air masses along with the presence of a storm riding along the clash created a volatile situation. “Everything came together in a small area at the right time to support supercells that could feed off of ramped-up instability,” Smerbeck said. Given that the Joplin tornado was the first in the U.S. to claim more than 100 lives since the Flint, Michigan, tornado that struck way back on June 8, 1953, a regional service assessment team was developed to assess the warning and forecast services provided by the National Weather Service (NWS). Despite lead warning time from the NWS, and tornado sirens that blared, the team reported that, “The majority of Joplin residents did not immediately take protective action upon receiving a first indication of risk (usually via the local siren system), regardless of the source of the warning. Most first chose to further assess their risk by waiting for, actively seeking, and filtering additional information before taking protective actions.” Responses varied based on previous experiences with severe weather since the area experiences a fair share of damaging thunderstorms and warnings as a result. In particular, the “perceived frequency of siren activation in Joplin” led many of those that participated in a survey after the disaster “to become desensitized or complacent to this method of warning.” And the blare of the siren was on-and-off that fateful day in Joplin. Many residents reported seeking alternate confirmation of the threat before taking action, including looking to see the tornado for themselves, which was complicated by the fact that the Joplin tornado was rain-wrapped and was difficult or nearly impossible to see — even for a trained eye. The report outlined several learnings from the calamity in order to reduce the perception of false alarms and any impacts on credibility, including more impact-based system that would offer more clarity on risk assessment to users. The NWS now confirms when tornadoes are on the ground in warnings. “If we were to confirm that a tornado is on the ground, as well as potentially confirm the intensity of that tornado, it will hasten the degree in which people seek additional information, and ultimately, take shelter,” Runnels explained. Even 10 years after the major tornado, it still stands out even to an expert who has been predicting severe weather for decades. “In terms of a single tornado chewing up people’s lives and homes and cars,” Smith said, “Joplin was probably the worst.” Despite the extensive damage and lives lost, the Joplin tornado was not the most violent twister Smith could recall. He said the damage from the tornado was “remarkable” mainly due to the population density in Joplin where the tornado tore through. The population in Joplin at the time, according to the NWS, was 50,000 and there were roughly 1,500 people living per square mile, Rummels said. “All tornadoes have damage and all tornadoes are therefore life-threatening,” Runnels explained. “What made Joplin different in my experience was the total nature of the destruction,” he continued. “You could not see a building that was not damaged over the swath of the path.” Keep checking back on AccuWeather.com and stay tuned to the AccuWeather Network on DirecTV, Frontier, Spectrum, FuboTV, Philo, and Verizon Fios.
