— The massive tornado that tore through Joplin, Mo. is now officially the deadliest single twister in the U.S. in nearly six decades with a death toll of at least 122.
City Manager Mark Rohr said Tuesday that more than 750 people were injured. Nine people also have been recovered from debris and authorities say the search and rescue is continuing.
The twister that hit Joplin on Sunday is the deadliest single tornado since the National Weather Service began keeping official records in 1950. It’s the 8th-deadliest single twister in U.S. history.
Crews busted holes in concrete slabs and sifted through strewn home goods Tuesday as rescuers focused on crumpled big-box stores and apartment complexes in Joplin in a frantic search for survivors of the deadliest single U.S. twister in about 60 years.
Emergency crews drilled through concrete at a ruined Home Depot, making peepholes in the rubble in hopes of finding lost shoppers and employees. A dog clambered through the shattered remains of a house, sniffing for any sign of the woman and infant who lived there.
Searchers fought the clock because anybody still alive after the deadliest single tornado in 60 years was losing precious strength two days after the disaster. And another round of storms was closing in.
For Milissa Burns, hope was fading that her 16-month-old grandson, whose parents were both hospitalized after the tornado hit their home, would be found.
On Tuesday, she showed up at a demolished dental office near the child’s home to watch a search team. At one point, a dog identified possible human remains, prompting eight searchers to dig frantically but came away with nothing. Burns was weary but composed. Her daughter — the boy’s aunt — sobbed next to her.
“We’ve already checked out the morgue,” Burns said. “I’ve called 911 a million times. I’ve done everything I can do. He was so light and little. He could be anywhere.”
The National Weather Service said Tuesday that the twister that crippled Joplin appeared to be a rare “multivortex” tornado, with two or more small and intense centers of rotation orbiting the larger funnel.
Another top job was testing the city’s tornado sirens to make sure they were operable ahead of another round of potentially violent weather starting Tuesday evening and expected to last into Wednesday in some places. Emergency officials warned jittery residents well in advance of the test.
David Imy, a meteorologist at the federal government’s Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Okla., said conditions were ripe for severe thunderstorms, including tornadoes, in parts of Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas, Texas, Kentucky and Tennessee, as well as nearly all of Oklahoma.
Throughout the search efforts, new reports emerged of clusters of victims: 11 people dead in a nursing home, three bodies found in an Elks Lodge.
The tornado tossed three vehicles into the Greenbriar nursing home and left nothing more than a 10-foot section of an interior wall standing. On the night of the twister, the Joplin Elks lodge had been scheduled to host its weekly bingo game.
“If that had been two hours later, there could have been 40 or 50 people in there,” said Chris Moreno, a hospital lab technician coordinating an outdoor triage center.
Jasper County Emergency Director Keith Stammer said the scope of the destruction was making it difficult to account for people affected by the storm. He suggested that many survivors, with nowhere to go, left Joplin for Kansas, Arkansas, Oklahoma or other parts of Missouri.
“There’s a lot of confusion, a lot of inability for folks to communicate,” he said.
