• Obama to visit region on Sunday as he says tornado was ‘devastating and heartbreaking’

 

Tonight the stunned residents of Joplin faced the horrifying possibility of more storms – but a tornado warning was cancelled later in the evening.

‘This is a very serious situation brewing,’ said Russell Schneider, director of the Storm Prediction Center.

About 1,500 people are still unaccounted for, it was announced Tuesday, leading to fears that the death count could rise much higher.

Tonight tornadoes touched down in Kansas and Oklahoma – including one on the outskirts of Oklahoma City, which reportedly tore a 50-mile long path through rush-hour traffic.

 

 

Thousands of houses have been reduced to slabs, cars crushed like soda cans and shaken residents  have been roaming streets in search of missing family members.

The National Weather Service said on Tuesday that the tornado appears to have had more than one vortex.

Storm Prediction Center director Russell Schneider said video evidence shows Sunday’s tornado appeared to be a rare ‘multivortex’ twister.

Multivortex tornadoes contain two or more small and intense subvortices that orbit the centre of the larger tornado circulation.

Survivors of the disaster were today coming to terms with the sheer scale of the devastation that had been wreaked upon their city. Still visibly shaken, many stared solemnly over the landscape.

‘That’s all that’s left,’ Roger Dedick said as he pointed to a section of foundation, the remains of his home of 17 years.

He had had to use a metal bar to pry himself out of his crushed home.

 

 

Only a few interior walls remained standing, but after a desperate search came a ray of hope when they found the terrified cat hiding under a bed.

Around the corner, Dottie and Tim Sumners had uncovered scores of framed photos and albums, memories that survived when the massive mile-wide tornado, with winds of up to 200 miles (320 kilometers) an hour hit late Sunday.

‘I’ll never disregard the sirens again,’ said Mrs Sumners.
Her husband looked on grimly at the scenes of devastation, and said they would rebuild their home of 33 years. ‘We’ll make it,’ he said.

Kelley Fritz, 45, rummaged through the remains of a storage building with her husband, Jimmy. They quickly realised they would never find the belongings they stored there, and that they had lost much of what was in their home after the tornado ripped away the roof.

Their sons, aged 20 and 17, went outside after the storm and saw that every home was destroyed.

‘My sons had deceased children in their arms when they came back,’ Mrs Fritz said. ‘My husband and I went out and saw two or three dead bodies on the ground.’

Flattened: Members of Missouri Task Force One search-and-rescue team work at the tornado-damaged Home Depot store in Joplin

 

Mrs Fritz said she was surprised she survived. ‘You could just feel the air pull up and it was so painful. I didn’t think we were going to make it, it happened so fast.’

‘I’ve never seen such devastation – just block upon block upon block of homes just completely gone,’ said former state legislator Gary Burton who showed up to help at a volunteer center at Missouri Southern State University.

Another resident had to run through the storm as power lines and trees crashed around him.

Winds from the storm carried debris up to 60 miles away, with medical records, X-rays, insulation and other items falling to the ground in Greene County, said Larry Woods, assistant director of the Springfield-Greene County Office of Emergency Management.
Matt Sheffer said: ‘My office is totally gone. Probably for two to three blocks, it’s just levelled.

‘The building that my office was in was not flimsy. It was 30 years old and two layers of brick. It was very sturdy and well built.’

As residents came to terms with the damage, President Barack Obama said he will travel to Missouri on Sunday to meet with people affected by what he called ‘devastating and heartbreaking’ tornadoes.

 

The President says he wants Midwesterners whose lives were disrupted by the deadly storms last weekend to know that the federal government will use all resources at its disposal to help them recover and rebuild.

Obama spoke in London, the second stop on his four-country, six-day tour of Europe. Obama is due back in Washington Saturday night.

Meteorologists issued a new tornado warning for the devastated city today as forecasters warned large swathes of the country to brace for more big storms on Tuesday.

A tornado watch was issued on Monday for Oklahoma and parts of southern Kansas due to an ‘evolving tornado threat’, said Russell Schneider, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Storm Prediction Center.

‘We are currently forecasting a major severe weather outbreak for Tuesday over the central United States with strong tornadoes likely over Oklahoma, Kansas, extreme northern Texas, southwest Missouri,’ Mr Schneider said.

The warning was extended to the area around Joplin, Missouri, and included cities such as Oklahoma City, Tulsa, Wichita, Topeka and Kansas City.

‘On Wednesday, the system will shift eastward to the Mississippi River valley,’ Mr Schneider said, including central Illinois and Indiana, southeast Missouri and the southeastern states of Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi and much of Arkansas.

Officials said the tornado that hit at around 6pm on Sunday was the single deadliest in the country since in Woodward, Oklahoma, in April 1947.

Joplin fire chief Mitch Randles estimated the damage covered a quarter or more of the city of about 50,000 people some 160 miles south of Kansas City and said his home was among those destroyed. ‘It cut the city in half,’ he said.

 

‘I spent most of my life at that hospital,’ Riscoe said at a triage center at Joplin’s Memorial Hall entertainment venue.

‘It’s awful. I had two pregnant nurses who dove under gurneys … It’s a testimony to the human spirit.’

At Memorial Hall, a downtown entertainment venue, nurses and other emergency workers from across the region treated critically injured patients.

At another makeshift unit at a Lowe’s home improvement store, wooden planks served as beds.

Outside, ambulances and fire trucks waited for calls. During one stretch after midnight on Monday, emergency vehicles were scrambling nearly every two minutes.

Tornado sirens gave residents about a 20-minute warning before the tornado touched down on the city’s west side.

Staff at St John’s Regional Medical Center rushed patients into hallways before the storm struck the nine-storey building, blowing out hundreds of windows and leaving the facility unusable.

The hospital was among the worst-hit locations.

Early on Monday, floodlights lit what remained of the building that once held as many 367 patients. Police officers could be seen combing the surrounding area for bodies.

In the parking lot, a helicopter lay crushed on its side, its rotors torn apart and windows smashed.

Nearby, a pile of cars lay crumpled into a single mass of twisted metal.

Winds from the storm carried debris up to 60 miles away, with medical records, X-rays, insulation and other items falling to the ground in Greene County, said Larry Woods, assistant director of the Springfield-Greene County Office of Emergency Management.

The Joplin twister was one of 68 reported tornadoes across seven Midwest states over the weekend, stretched from Oklahoma to Wisconsin, according to the National Weather Service’s Storm Prediction Center.

One person was killed in Minneapolis. But the devastation in Missouri was the worst, eerily reminiscent of the tornadoes that killed more than 300 people across the South last month.

Residents said the damage was breathtaking in scope.

‘You see pictures of World War II, the devastation and all that with the bombing. That’s really what it looked like,’ said Kerry Sachetta, the principal of a flattened Joplin High School.

 

‘I couldn’t even make out the side of the building. It was total devastation in my view. I just couldn’t believe what I saw.’

Emergency management officials rushed heavy equipment to Joplin to help lift debris and clear the way for search and recovery operations.

Governor Nixon declared a state of emergency, and President Barack Obama said the Federal Emergency Management Agency was working with state and local agencies.

Jeff Lehr, a reporter for the Joplin Globe, said he was upstairs in his home when the storm hit but was able to make his way to a basement closet.

The storm tore the roof off his house, but he was safe. When he emerged, he found people wandering through the streets, covered in mud.

‘I’m talking to them, asking if they knew where their family is,’ Mr Lehr said. ‘Some of them didn’t know and weren’t sure where they were. All the street markers were gone.’

Justin Gibson, 30, huddled with three relatives outside the tangled debris of a Home Depot. He pointed to a black pickup that had been tossed into the store’s ruins and said it belonged to his roommate’s brother, who was last seen in the store with his two young daughters.

Mr Gibson, who has three children of his own, said his home was levelled and ‘everything in that neighbourhood is gone. The high school, the churches, the grocery store. I can’t get hold of my ex-wife to see how my kids are.

‘I don’t know the extent of this yet,’ he said, ‘but I know I’ll have friends and family dead.’

In Minneapolis, where a tornado killed one person and injured 29, authorities imposed an overnight curfew in a 4-square-mile area, including some of the city’s poorest neighbourhoods, to prevent looting and keep streets clear for emergency crews.

Mayor RT Rybak said one liquor store was looted right after the tornado hit late Sunday and a few burglaries took place overnight.

He said it wasn’t immediately clear how many homes were affected, simply saying: ‘It’s a lot.’

 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1389737/Joplin-MO-tornado-At-89-dead-twister-cuts-4-mile-swathe-Missouri-town.html