Tornadoes Batter Central US, Kill Unknown Number

[xomputer]

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1sxjy3sE4c&nofeather=True]YouTube - ‪Tornadoes Batter Central US, Kill Unknown Number‬‏[/ame]

A massive tornado blasted its way across southwestern Missouri on Sunday, flattening several blocks of homes and businesses, smashing up cars and leaving an untold number of people dead.

I'm so sorry about what happened.

 

[editec]

"Dude, the trees are debarked!"​

AP is reporting 89 confimed dead in Joplin and "up to" 1/3 of the city damaged.

Missouri tornado death toll rises | World news | guardian.co.uk

Another windy wet, cold, raw day here in Mid-Coast Maine.

I shouldn't bitch, I suppose, but I think I'd getting rickets from a lack of Vitamin D.

 

[Douger]

Not a block, tie beam or steel column to be seen.
Crackerboxes and tornadoes don't make good neighbors.

 

[rdean]

Worst of the worst. This morning on Morning Joe, the weather man said the conditions will be right for even more so listen for "tornado warnings". I'm so thankful for scientists who put systems in place where we can get a warning even it's not much of one, it's still a warning.

 

[waltky]

New tornadoes cut destructive trail in US...

New tornadoes cut destructive trail across Oklahoma, as storms hit Kansas
May 25, 2011 - VIOLENT thunderstorms roaring across middle America have killed another six people in two states, with several tornadoes touching down in Oklahoma and high winds pounding rural Kansas.

Authorities say a series of tornadoes that rolled through the Oklahoma City area have killed at least four people. At least 60 people were also injured around the state, including three critically injured children. In Kansas, police say two people died when high winds threw a tree into their van near the small town of St John, about 160 kilometres west of Wichita.

The high-powered storms arrived as forecast just two days after a massive tornado tore through the southwest Missouri town of Joplin and killed at least 122 people. Television footage showed multiple massive twisters touching down in rural areas near Oklahoma's state capital Oklahoma City. “This is a very dangerous time right now,” Governor Mary Fallin earlier told CNN, as she urged Oklahomans to immediately take shelter from “several ... huge tornadoes on the ground”. State offices and many businesses let workers leave hours earlier to get out of harm's way.

Neighbours recover items from a house in Oklahoma destroyed by a tornado.

In Joplin, rescuers continue to comb through overturned cars and flattened buildings hunting for survivors. A massive funnel-cloud, with winds of up to 320km an hour, tore through the Joplin with devastating force, leaving 122 people dead and hundreds more missing. Joplin city manager Mark Rohr said earlier that there was an increasing sense of urgency, as rescuers scoured the town's rubble and debris in hopes of finding more survivors. “People's lives are at stake,” Mr Rohr told a press conference. “We are still in search and rescue mode, and will be for the foreseeable future,” he said, almost two full days since the disaster flattened much of this town of some 50,000 people.

Officials said the tornado ranks as the eighth deadliest in American history, and the deadliest single twister to strike the United States since modern records began in 1950 - rising above the toll in a tornado in Flint, Michigan in 1953 that left 116 people dead. More than 8,000 structures in this town bordering the heartland states of Kansas and Oklahoma were damaged or destroyed when the twister came roaring through with just a 24-minute warning. The massive twister cut a swathe of destruction 6.4km long and a kilometre wide.

Source

See also:

Missouri tornado to cost $3 billion
May 25, 2011 - INSURED losses from the deadly mega-tornado that smashed through Joplin, Missouri could run from $1 billion to $3 billion, risk and loss estimator Eqecat has said.

One of the single deadliest tornadoes to ever hit the country, the Joplin twister turned parts of the city into rubble on Sunday, leaving 122 people dead and hundreds more missing. "Preliminary reports from emergency management officials in Joplin indicate that up to a quarter of the building stock (2,000 buildings) in the city have been destroyed," Eqecat said in a statement. Another 5,000-10,000 buildings and houses, or up to 75 per cent of the total in the small city, were damaged, it estimated. The estimate of possible losses on insured property was only preliminary, Eqecat stressed.

Meanwhile, forecasters warned that more potent storms were on the way in the area around Joplin, Missouri. "We are currently forecasting a major severe weather outbreak over the central United States with strong tornadoes likely over Oklahoma, Kansas, extreme northern Texas, southwest Missouri," said Russell Schneider, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Storm Prediction Centre. "There are some very dense population areas," Mr Schneider said. "This is a very serious situation that is brewing." At least 481 people have died in tornadoes so far this year, the earliest that such a high toll has been reached, Mr Schneider said.

The tornado in Joplin tied with a 1953 Flint, Michigan, twister as the single deadliest in records going back to 1950. Missouri Governor Jay Nixon yesterday said seven people had been rescued from rubble in Joplin. There were reports of scattered looting in the city of 50,000. Mr Nixon declared a state of emergency and said he was "optimistic that there are still lives out there to be saved". But he warned: "There are going to be some things out there that are going to be hard to see and stomach.". The outbreak follows a month after at least 305 tornadoes tore through the southern US, killing 327 people.

Source

 

[Mr. H.]

I heard there's somewhere around 1,200 "missing" in Joplin.

 

[waltky]

Just to give an indication of the power of the Joplin tornado...

Joplin tornado sends store receipt record 525 miles to Indiana
May 27, 2011 - A receipt from a tire store in Joplin, Mo., turned up 525 miles away on a front porch in north-central Indiana, a record distance for apparent tornado debris to travel, a Purdue University storm researcher reports.

"This paper traveled more than twice as far as the longest distance recorded for debris from a storm," said Ernest Agee, professor of earth and atmospheric sciences and tornado expert. The previous record was a canceled check that traveled 210 miles after the 1915 tornado in Great Bend, Kan.

The receipt, which was dated May 13 from Joplin Tire Center and folded into a quarter of its full size, landed in Royal Center, Ind., about 45 miles from West Lafayette, home of Purdue. The receipt was found Wednesday by Tia Fritz and her husband; she contacted Agee.

He told the university's news service that to reach Indiana the receipt would have to have been sucked into the tornado and then carried by the jet stream for 12 1/2 hours.

He explained that the distance paper travels is directly proportional to the intensity of the tornado. The Joplin tornado registered EF-5, the strongest, with winds topping 200 mph. The death toll stands at 132.

Source

 

[editec]

Those of you who live in tornado Alley might find the following very interesting reading.

As I read this report, there does not appear to be conclusive evidence that tornados are getting worse.


http://www.spc.noaa.gov/publications/mccarthy/tor30yrs.pdf

This paper looks at the reported frequencies of
tornadoes and their characteristics over the contiguous
United States since 1970. There was a significant
increase in tornado occurrence during two periods in the
last 33 years – in the early 1980s when National
Weather Service (NWS) warning verification began, and
in 1990 when the WSR-88D became operational. The
frequency of tornadoes is also compared to fatalities
and tornado days over the same period. Also, tornado
frequency is compared to F-scale damage categories
(Fujita, 1971). Finally, it will be seen that the number of
strong and violent tornadoes has not varied much since
1970, and that long-track and very-long-track tornadoes
as defined by the Illinois State Water Survey remain a​

very low percentage of all tornadoes reported.

In the 1970s, there was an average of
858 tornadoes per year. In the 1990s, this increased by
almost 30% to an average of a little over 1200​

tornadoes per year.

Dr. Changnon has long advocated the use of “event
days” because of its mitigation of the impact of reporting
biases (Changnon and Schnickedanz, 1969). When
tornado days are plotted against year (Fig. 2), the rapid
inflation that is apparent in the numbers of reported
tornadoes is no longer present. Instead, only small​

changes are seen over the period 1970 through 2002;