A race to find survivors before more storms arrive

Amy Gilbert stands in what is left of her kitchen Tues­day in Joplin , Mo. Gilbert and her hus­band, Eric, were stand­ing in the kitchen as the roof began to tear away from the house dur­ing a tor­nado Sun­day night. The cou­ple was able to seek shel­ter in a bath­room off the kitchen along with their eight-year-old daugh­ter their dogs and a friend. All sur­vived with­out injury. (Asso­ci­ated Press | Jeff Roberson)

ALAN SCHER ZAGIER, JIM SALTER, NOMAAN MERCHANT

Asso­ci­ated Press

JOPLIN, Mis­souri — 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.

Across dev­as­tated Joplin, searchers moved from one enor­mous debris pile to another Tues­day, rac­ing to respond to any report of a pos­si­ble survivor.

The human toll rose to at least 122 dead and 750 peo­ple hurt. But just nine had been pulled alive from the after­math. 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.

She showed up Tues­day 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 they 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 done every­thing I can do. He was so light and lit­tle. He could be anywhere.”

Also Tues­day, the National Weather Ser­vice announced that the twister that crip­pled Joplin was an EF-5, the strongest rat­ing assigned to tor­na­does, with winds of more than 200 mph (320 kph). Sci­en­tists said it appeared to be a rare “mul­ti­vor­tex” tor­nado, with two or more small and intense cen­ters of rota­tion orbit­ing the larger funnel.

It was the dead­liest sin­gle twister since the weather ser­vice began keep­ing offi­cial records in 1950 and the eighth-deadliest in U.S. history.

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, 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.

A short time later, severe thun­der­storms spawned a tor­nado that killed two peo­ple dur­ing the evening rush hour in sub­ur­ban Okla­homa City.

Through­out the search efforts in Joplin, 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 (three-meter) sec­tion of an inte­rior wall standing.

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.

Author­i­ties also announced a cur­few from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m., with only res­i­dents and emer­gency work­ers allowed inside the dis­as­ter zone.

Peo­ple in the Joplin area and beyond have turned to online social net­works to find fam­ily mem­bers miss­ing since the tor­nado or to learn about the plight of survivors.

Mul­ti­ple Face­book pages cre­ated since the tor­nado are filled with requests for infor­ma­tion about spe­cific peo­ple who have not been heard from since Sun­day. Some pages include pho­tos of the miss­ing. Other posts share the news about Joplin res­i­dents who are alive and well.

Sev­eral social-networking efforts specif­i­cally focused on find­ing infor­ma­tion about Will Nor­ton, a teenager who van­ished on his way home from his high school grad­u­a­tion cer­e­mony. More than 10,000 peo­ple have sup­ported the “Help Find Will Nor­ton” com­mu­nity page on Face­book, and Twit­ter users were tweet­ing heav­ily about the miss­ing teen.

Fam­ily mem­bers told The Asso­ci­ated Press that Nor­ton and his father were still on the road when the storm hit. Mark Nor­ton urged his son to pull over, but the teen’s Hum­mer H3 flipped sev­eral times, throw­ing the young man from the vehi­cle, likely through the sunroof.

The elder Nor­ton was hospitalized.

From the air, the dif­fi­culty of the search was apparent.

The tor­nado dam­age was “like tak­ing a mower through tall grass. That’s what it looks like,” said state Sen. Ron Richard of Joplin, who flew over the area with Nixon and Sen. Claire McCaskill. He described the dev­as­ta­tion as “down to the ground.”

The Home Depot was iden­ti­fi­able only by the preva­lence of the store’s sig­na­ture orange color in the cor­ru­gated roof­ing and metal fram­ing that looked almost as if it had been melted.

Jack­ham­mers pounded against heavy con­crete slabs that once held up the store. Crews were des­per­ate to punch through so dogs could sniff for any scent of peo­ple below. A day ear­lier, res­cuers found one per­son alive in the store’s wreck­age but also recov­ered seven bod­ies under the concrete.

Posted by AP News on May 25 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.