![]() But Monday afternoon, torrential rain poured through the roof. When the tornado passed, they emerged to find their house seemingly intact, minus the windows. Melissa Clark and Richard Slimp, both 26, took refuge with their four small children and six neighbors in the basement of their white clapboard house. “I didn’t think anybody was alive,” he said.īehind the nursing home, a Catholic church was destroyed all that stood was a cross.Īll around Joplin, families reunited gratefully, still puzzling over their fates, and those of others less fortunate. All the buildings he passed were destroyed. When he left to find help, he had to pick his way past decapitated bodies. He was able to duck into a closet-sized room with a few other people, including a man in a wheelchair. “It just sucked everybody out,” Simonds said. Then the glass-plated front of the building burst. ![]() “Everybody was praying you could hear people praying, ‘Please God don’t kill me,’ ” he said. Simonds could see cars being tossed overhead. The tornado tore the roof off the nursing home. About a dozen staffers tried to gather up the 85 patients into the central hall, since the home had no basement. John’s hospital, where a helicopter had been blown off the roof, Zach Simonds was cleaning floors at the Greenbrier Nursing Home when he heard a “code red” announcement on the intercom. “They didn’t know what happened to their families,” Persoff said, “and yet they were focused 190% on keeping people alive.”Ī few blocks from St. Flagging down an emergency worker, he got directions to the nearest functioning hospital, where he and his friend helped treat patients all night, amazed at the dedication of the hospital staff. He pulled off the highway into Joplin and saw crumpled semi trucks. “This storm will do incredible things,” Persoff remembered thinking.īut as the pair headed into Missouri, they heard on the radio that a “debris ball” had been spotted on radar - a mass of material torn from the ground, carried along by the turbulence. Jason Persoff, 39, a Florida internist and storm chaser, had been in southeast Kansas on Sunday with his storm-chasing partner, also a physician, when they realized they were seeing something huge. ![]() The May record of 542 tornadoes was set in 2003.Īnother twister touched down Sunday in north Minneapolis, Minn., killing one person.ĭr. The weather service also said that more than 100 tornadoes had occurred during May, the most active month for tornadoes. ![]() (Multiple tornadoes were responsible for approximately 344 deaths over four days in late April, mostly in Alabama.) With winds as high as 198 mph, it was rated F-4 on the Fujita scale, one step below the strongest tornado. The National Weather Service said Monday that the Joplin tornado was the deadliest single tornado since a 1953 twister killed 116 in Flint, Mich. Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator Craig Fugate was on his way to Joplin to coordinate federal disaster relief, said White House spokesman Nick Shapiro. President Obama, visiting Ireland, expressed his condolences in a telephone call to Nixon. ![]()
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