Jay Nixon told CNN that he has dispatched National Guard troops to Joplin to help the city cope with the emergency. President Obama said Monday that the Federal Emergency Management Agency was working with state and local agencies, and Missouri Gov. There were no working gas pumps, and cars and trucks were lined up 20 deep at stations 15 miles east of the city, Dan Verbeck of KCUR reported. Travel through and around Joplin was difficult, with Interstate 44 shut down and streets clogged with emergency vehicles and the wreckage of buildings. During one stretch after midnight Monday, emergency vehicles were scrambling nearly every two minutes. Outside, ambulances and firetrucks waited for calls. At Memorial Hall, a downtown entertainment venue, nurses and other emergency workers from across the region were treating critically injured patients.Īt another makeshift unit at a Lowe's home improvement store, wooden planks served as beds. Triage centers and shelters set up around the city quickly filled to capacity. Missy Shelton of KSMU reported that the city was eerily quiet, punctuated now and then by the sound of a siren, as people wandered around, bewildered, and took in the destruction. "You could hear our computers and things just whipping by us." "It was like a train coming through the facility and the wind was so great," she said. John's, told NPR's Michele Norris that she was in the triage department of the emergency room when the twister struck. precious few minutes to get out into the parking lot, to get people in the safety corridor of the hospital."Īngie Abner, a paramedic and an emergency room nurse at St. "Cars are tumbled all over the parking lot. "Every window in that building is now broken," City Councilwoman Melodee Colbert-Kean told NPR. Nearby, a pile of cars lay crumpled into a single mass of twisted metal. In the parking lot, a helicopter lay crushed on its side, its rotors torn apart and windows smashed. The staff had just minutes' notice to hustle patients into hallways before the storm struck the nine-story building, blowing out hundreds of windows and leaving the hospital useless. But the devastation in Missouri was the worst of the day, reminiscent of the tornadoes that killed more than 300 people across the South last month.Īmong the worst-hit locations in Joplin was St. The Joplin twister was one of 68 reported tornadoes across seven Midwest states over the weekend, from Oklahoma to Wisconsin, according to the National Weather Service's Storm Prediction Center. People were forced to weather the assault in bathrooms and bathtubs. Closer to the tornado zone, it simply looked as if the town had been chewed up in a blender and spit out across miles.įire chief Mitch Randles estimated that as much as one-third of the city was damaged, and said his own home was among the buildings destroyed as the twister swept through this city of about 50,000 people some 160 miles south of Kansas City.įormer Mayor Gary Shaw said Joplin looked like a war zone.Įmergency sirens went off 20 minutes before the tornado hit, but many of the homes in the area, built in the 1960s, do not have basements. To one observer approaching the town Monday, evidence of the wreckage began with obvious debris amid an eerie calm on the outskirts of town. One man retrieved a file cabinet from a crawlspace that opened to reveal a treasure chest of personal papers. Some survivors searched for what could be salvaged from homes that seemed totally destroyed. Heavy equipment helped move some debris while volunteers wearing gloves picked through more fragile scenes of destruction. The search was on for survivors Monday, with more than 1,500 volunteers helping police, firefighters and other first responders. Even people who've lived here for years and years are having trouble finding their way around because the street signs are gone and nothing looks familiar.
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