On the 10 year anniversary of the Joplin Tornado

June 22, 2021 11:45 AM

Usually when a tornado comes through, the path of destruction is more haphazard. It can sometimes look like the vortex drops down and picks up one house but leaves the neighbor’s untouched, or will tear a roof off here but not there. This wasn’t like that. Everything around as far as the eye could see to the east and to the west, was flattened. Flatter than hammered shit.

Mentioned in the above piece: Deadline in Disaster, about the staff of the Joplin Globe newspaper in the aftermath of the tornado.

posted by latkes (46 comments total)

More details on wikipedia.....Holy Shit.
posted by lalochezia at 11:56 AM on June 22, 2021 [1 favorite]

That was unexpected...

Grew up in Tornado Country.

Never hit where we were, though I saw them coming several times.
posted by Windopaene at 12:15 PM on June 22, 2021

I remember seeing that Army map of the scar. I can't imagine.
posted by rhizome at 12:16 PM on June 22, 2021

Tornadoes: nature's belt sander.
posted by rhizome at 12:17 PM on June 22, 2021 [1 favorite]

I have relatives that live just outside Pittsburg (Kansas) mentioned by name in the article. Joplin is where they did their big shopping. So this hit home to me.

Added resonance from the tornado-producing storm that just came through Chicago on Sunday night. One of my friends lives only half a mile from where the tornado touched down around Wood Dale. My household spent a good hour hunkering down in the basement that night.

So yeah, I was already thinking about tornados this week. Now I’m thinking about them some more.
posted by notoriety public at 12:26 PM on June 22, 2021 [1 favorite]

“Sucked out of the sunroof.” Jesus. I grew up in Kansas, and saw many tornadoes firsthand. One staggered down my street, and put the neighbor’s roof in our backyard. My dad and grandpa would turn on the weather radio when the clouds started to rotate. The EAS siren and automated bulletin were sublime—awesome and terrible.

I was scared of tornadoes. I am scared of tornadoes.
posted by Don.Kinsayder at 12:31 PM on June 22, 2021 [3 favorites]

I still can't decide whether I prefer tornadoes or hurricanes. On the one hand, you've got a lot more warning for a hurricane. On the other hand, tornadoes aren't very likely to hit your house and help arrives a lot quicker.
posted by wierdo at 12:37 PM on June 22, 2021

I was scared of tornadoes. I am scared of tornadoes.

And tornadoes with hailing sex toys -- those too?
posted by y2karl at 1:02 PM on June 22, 2021

Ballistic dildo. No thanks.
posted by Don.Kinsayder at 1:10 PM on June 22, 2021

I prefer a hurricane. My house in Orlando is relatively new and built to withstand them. A tornado would wreck it.
posted by Splunge at 1:24 PM on June 22, 2021

I have relatives in Joplin. Their parish church was hit hard and the priest survived by sheltering in the bathtub as the rectory was demolished around him.
posted by sjswitzer at 1:36 PM on June 22, 2021

I'd previously been one of the people assuming that hurricanes were more dangerous, even if the on-the-ground damage in a given spot where a tornado touched down was likely worse, because the tornado damage was relatively precise if random. But the incidence of tornado clusters is increasing. On the other hand, hurricanes are becoming worse, too. Happy Tuesday!
posted by Halloween Jack at 1:48 PM on June 22, 2021 [2 favorites]

I’ve seen and heard my share of tornadoes. Some within blocks of my home. One hit my kindergarten school. We did kindergarten in shifts, morning and afternoon. Whichever one it was when it hit, mine was the other so I missed the excitement. As far as I remember nobody was hurt but we got sent to different schools afterwards… which is how I had three different kindergartens since I’d moved there mid-term.

Capricious bastards, tornadoes.
posted by sjswitzer at 1:50 PM on June 22, 2021

Hurricanes spawn tornadoes also, so you don’t have to pick just one!
posted by Huffy Puffy at 1:52 PM on June 22, 2021 [14 favorites]

The author writes like a self-aggrandizing, condescending, know it all. Even more so than me.

Fascinating read though.
posted by subaruwrx at 2:36 PM on June 22, 2021 [5 favorites]

I drove through the aftermath while moving. Everything was shorn down to 6 inches in some places, this was destructive even by “normal” tornado standards. The gas station was untouched so I thought I’d fill up there to show whatever meager support I could. There were people lined up out the door, not to pay for gas or buy snacks, but to offer up food, water, bedding - this was one of the only local buildings with power and was acting at the time as a support center. It was incredible to see and it’s still the only time I’ve cried while pumping gas.
posted by q*ben at 2:43 PM on June 22, 2021 [8 favorites]

Hurricanes do often spawn tornadoes, but they are typically short lived and relatively weak, as tornadoes go. A hurricane isn't going to spin up a long track EF4+. An EF3 or less is generally survivable with even a few seconds' warning unless you live in a mobile home and if you're in a mobile home when a hurricane is approaching, I question your self-preservation instinct. Your house will be destroyed, but not completely razed as happened in such a wide swath of Joplin. It's precisely that unusually large path of extreme damage that makes the Joplin tornado so notable. Most similarly strong tornadoes have smaller paths of total devastation, if they hit much of anything but corn fields in the first place.
posted by wierdo at 2:48 PM on June 22, 2021 [1 favorite]

I went to college near Xenia, OH, where there was a large tornado cluster in April, 1974, killing 36 people. The aftermath was a wide swath of damage; in some areas, there were only concrete pads where homes had been, with stubs of chimneys and twisted plumbing. I've never experienced such weather; the sky really did appear green at times. Meteorology has gotten so much better, there are now emergency sirens, and alerts to mobile phones and such. I always have an emergency plan for my home and office, please consider that for whatever dangers exist where you are.
posted by theora55 at 3:11 PM on June 22, 2021 [5 favorites]

My brother was nailed to his house when the roof collapsed and I watched it all day waiting to hear from him...could SEE his house, but no movement around it. He remembers "it's like the whole world is a monster"
posted by lextex at 3:22 PM on June 22, 2021

I was an immigrant kid in Edmonton who watched too much PBS. One day I looked up at the sky and said to my mother "this is tornado weather".

...my mother, for whom tornadoes were practically a Hollywood fantasy in terms of actual risk, dismissed my remark saying "and how would you know?"

About an hour later 27 people died, shortly after hail the size of bowling balls ruined our roof and all of the cars in the neighborhood.

When Joplin happened I was in the construction engineering world and distinctly remember being surprised at the structural damage to Mercy Hospital. Like wait, is that even possible? That a nine story building could rotate on its foundation like that? "Amusingly" my first reaction was, well obviously some engineer fucked up and should have their license stripped. Took, I dunno, maybe a couple of hours before I realized no, actually, the storm really was just that powerful.
posted by aramaic at 3:33 PM on June 22, 2021 [11 favorites]

Google Street View of Rangeline Rd, June 2011. That road has been driven several times, you can flip back to 2007 to see "before", as well as the progression since.
posted by Mister Fabulous at 4:27 PM on June 22, 2021

The author writes like a self-aggrandizing, condescending, know it all

Huh? I really am not getting that. I mean, the line about coastal elites maybe a little condescending, but I don't see anything self-aggrandizing at all? And he's mostly stating facts and observations, so to the extent it is know it all, it is in fact things he knows.
posted by tavella at 5:26 PM on June 22, 2021 [3 favorites]

The American Experience on PBS recently had a fascinating film on Ted Fujita, creator of the tornado scale that bears his name.  His entry at Wikipedia is criminally short, given he narrowly missed getting vaporized by the Nagasaki atom bomb, immigrated to the US barely speaking any English, and developed both the Fujita scale and discovered microbursts, but the The American Experience piece at least does him justice.
posted by los pantalones del muerte at 6:39 PM on June 22, 2021 [7 favorites]

the line about coastal elites maybe a little condescending

... a little? It was a pathetic, pandering comment that belittled the entire article.

Here's a different way to put it: "for you people who have escaped our benighted region"

Any better?

No? Huh. Wonder why.
posted by aramaic at 7:32 PM on June 22, 2021 [2 favorites]

nailed to his house , lextex? Like Odysseus and his mast?
posted by clew at 7:32 PM on June 22, 2021 [1 favorite]

As someone who probably qualifies as a coastal elite for the purposes of that sentence, I gotta say, it didn't bother me.

The guy survived a horrific natural disaster and lived to write about it. If he wants to be a little glib and gently rib me for being from somewhere where I don't have to worry about the sky spontaneously descending to rend the earth catastrophically on a summer afternoon, so be it.
posted by evidenceofabsence at 8:18 PM on June 22, 2021 [7 favorites]

Not sure if it's self aggrandizing or condescending, but yeah something about the author's style grates. Actually, I think the writing is just kind of clumsy and he couldn't be bothered to try, but despite that the story is both horrifying and fascinating.
posted by blue shadows at 9:48 PM on June 22, 2021 [1 favorite]

Interesting. I, a coastal elite, and general word fan, was drawn to the article by the writing more than the content (though the content is a doozy). Different strokes.
posted by latkes at 10:21 PM on June 22, 2021 [1 favorite]

That article is beautifully written and deeply felt.

In between both big box stores is a Pizza Hut, where 15 patrons are eating their Sunday supper when the sirens go off. The manager, Christopher Lucas, ushers everyone, including his employees, into the walk-in freezer for their own safety. He loops a strap around the door handle and braces to hold it closed. The winds are too powerful though, and they suck the freezer door right off its hinges, and Lucas too, strapped to it as he is. Everyone else in the freezer survives. At home safe is Lucas’s girlfriend, who is pregnant with his third child.

As I read this paragraph, I was like 'No! Don't tempt it!', and I bet every single adult who was with him in that freezer will regret not trying to pull him away from the door and down to the floor with the rest of them to their dying day.
posted by jamjam at 11:54 PM on June 22, 2021 [4 favorites]

My elderly in-laws lived in Joplin (we live in the UK). After the tornado hit we couldn't get in touch for awhile and feared the worst - we'd heard that a large part of their street had been destroyed.

When we finally made contact they were having a barbecue in the back garden - I think power and gas were off. They hadn't tried to get in touch because they didn't think we'd have heard about it and didn't want to bother us in case we worried.
posted by BinaryApe at 12:21 AM on June 23, 2021 [1 favorite]

Hey I still remember the original MeFi discussion on this event, wherein some non-Midwesterners blamed the victims of this unprecedented natural disaster for living in wood frame houses. (I, a Missourian, had a response at the time. Y'all can look it up.)

MeFi wasn't the only place I came across that sort of thing at the time.

As it turns out, I'm cool with the author's "coastal elites" reference in this context.
posted by BlueJae at 5:47 AM on June 23, 2021 [10 favorites]

It's weird to me that anyone gets self-aggrandizing or arrogance off of this article. But I do get the sense of a rage simmering below the surface, which is familiar, I think, to anyone who has suffered a lingering trauma and then relives it. The rage at one's powerlessness, at the loss, at the sheer magnitude of oh my god, there was almost nothing anyone could have done.

Anyone who can listen to the audio of those people trapped in the gas station walk-in and not feel a kind of desperate sadness and anger on their behalf is, I guess, some kind of superhuman.

And as for the "condescension" of ... explaining what tornadoes are, in an article about a tornado...

seconding BlueJae that honestly, every time a massive tornado hits and brings calamity it becomes abundantly clear that people who don't live in a tornado-prone area just plain don't know a whole lot about them. How many times has someone had to explain on the Blue that yes, tornadoes can hit cities, after all? If you already know what a tornado is and how we measure them with the Fujita scale and what they can do, you can always skip the 40ish words dedicated to informing those who do not.

Did the author have to use the phrase coastal elites? No, I suppose not, but the term is a sort of common tongue-in-cheek reference these days and clearly an article that starts with dildo rain is going for a kind of bleak humor.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 8:16 AM on June 23, 2021 [6 favorites]

(quibbles about writing style are a separate matter; this is a very quintessentially dry midwestern newspaper voice that readers of the late Mike Royko probably recognize right off the bat, but it's not everyone's cup of tea.)
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 8:18 AM on June 23, 2021 [4 favorites]

I don’t know about the level of profanity filter that this particular paper might normally have in place, but my headcanon for the “hammered shit” line, is that when the editor reached it, they paused for a moment, and then wrote “stet”.
posted by notoriety public at 9:47 AM on June 23, 2021 [2 favorites]

Hammered shit - sounds like a fan of Deadwood.
posted by stltony at 10:43 AM on June 23, 2021

Having grown up in Minnesota and then one day needing to hide in a roadside rest stop as a tornado juuuuuust missed us (view from the parking lot as we pulled in, just before Dad & I ran to take shelter, each with a toddler in our arms), I am here to say:

tornadoes scare the poop out of me.

God bless the people of Joplin who came together and rebuilt: I don't know if I would have had the fortitude to stay.
posted by wenestvedt at 11:06 AM on June 23, 2021 [3 favorites]

It is nice to be reminded that I am a member of at least one elite.
posted by y2karl at 11:56 AM on June 23, 2021

As a man with a little collection of black T shirts with INNER CITY LATTE SIPPER printed on the back, I have no problem with being referred to as a member of the coastal elites even though I live neither in the city nor on a coast.
posted by flabdablet at 8:13 AM on June 24, 2021

This is the town where I was born and have spent short stretches of time regularly throughout my life, and where some of my family still lives. We were lucky, all of my family survived and even had their homes still intact, while houses as close as the opposite side of the street were flattened. My brother is just a few years older than Will Norton and knew him a bit -- I remember those few days where everyone was still holding out hope that Will might be found alive. The town is rebuilt (if still a bit treeless), but I don't think anyone who was there that day wasn't deeply scarred by it, and I think the tone of the piece makes a lot of sense in that context. I also just liked the piece a lot.

Despite being primarily a coastal elite myself with comparatively weak Joplin ties, one thing I can claim over the author is that I *have* been inside Christie's Toy Box! Although I followed the tornado coverage pretty closely, I somehow completely missed the dildos story. I like its inclusion here -- its such a good encapsulation of the absolute arbitrariness of tornado damage. I think I've posted this before in previous tornado-related MeFi posts, but I always come back to David Foster Wallace's "Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley" (a work I still love, despite everything I know now about the author):

Tornadoes were, in our part of Central Illinois, the dimensionless point at which parallel lines met and whirled and blew up. They made no sense. Houses blew not out but in. Brothels were spared while orphanages next door bought it. Dead cattle were found three miles from their silage without a scratch on them. Tornadoes are omnipotent and obey no law. Force without law has no shape, only tendency and duration. I believe now that I knew all this without knowing it, as a kid.
posted by naoko at 9:49 AM on June 24, 2021 [3 favorites]

I remember reading someplace that even in Tornado Alley, the chances of a tornado striking any specific location are about once in 300 years. So, tornadoes in your area, not unexpected; tornadoes hit you or someone you know, sort of unexpected.
posted by Flexagon at 12:41 PM on June 25, 2021

Around this time I was working at a call center that specialized in research studies. One of the projects we were hired to do was studying the effects of natural disasters on teenagers. Jopin was one of the areas the study covered. I think I talked to people from Tuscaloosa too. We'd interview the parents about how affected their family had been, and then interview the kid which was mostly one of those standardized depression and anxiety screeners. Then we'd call them again in a few months and do it again, to see how answers changed.

The thing that stood out most to me was that the effects of these tornadoes was very polarizing. For the most part everyone I talked to was either "that was a mile away from us; we weren't affected at all" or "our house and all our worldly belongings were destroyed". There weren't many people who reported a medium amount of effect on their lives, if any.

I found the study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4465037/

I was one of the "highly trained, supervised employees" mentioned.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 10:13 PM on June 25, 2021 [2 favorites]

My dad was from Mountain Grove, Missouri, about two hours due east of Joplin. I spent summers at my grandparents' farm there as a kid.

All of the relatives on my dad's side of the family live in Springfield, a little over an hour east. My first semester of college was at (then) Southwest Missouri State University.

I grew up in Fairfax County, Virginia, which Sarah Palin later said wasn't part of "real America." I live in a 1,000-square-foot home in the Bay Area. "Coastal elites" are fighting words for me and I have zero tolerance for them.
posted by kirkaracha at 9:33 PM on June 26, 2021

Blue states subsidize red states. So people in red states are fine taking our "coastal elite" money while they sneer at us for not being Real Americans.

I love my family in Missouri, and because of them and because I've spent time in southwest Missouri I care for the people there. I want a federal government that takes care of all Americans. I'd be happy if my tax money went to help people rebuild after tornadoes and other natural disasters, anywhere in the United States. I just fucking hate being insulted by people I'm happy to care for.
posted by kirkaracha at 9:55 PM on June 26, 2021

"Coastal elites" are fighting words for me

and that, of course, is exactly why the people who sling them do sling them. They want to keep you fighting mad so that your ability to get stuff done goes out the window.

"Inner city latte sipper" used to be fighting words for me as well, until I worked out that reacting to that kind of obviously deliberate attempt to affront, distract and divide by actually taking offence achieves nothing but making me miserable.

As I've got older, I've come around to the position that anybody who deliberately offers this kind of insult is, in effect, walking around under a big tall hat with DOOFUS written on it. And I actually appreciate the willingness of these doofuses to out themselves in this way.

We can't change these people, so our only option is to organize our way around them, and that effort is only made less difficult by their eagerness to tell us all exactly who they are.
posted by flabdablet at 1:21 AM on June 27, 2021

I think the dry humor and suppressed bitterness of the author and article is not landing for everyone here.
posted by latkes at 6:27 AM on June 27, 2021 [3 favorites]

in Tornado Alley, the chances of a tornado striking any specific location are about once in 300 year

The same expected period of return for Big One earthquakes in the PNW! Different distribution though.

One of the advantages of a big polity is that the PNW (eg) can send regular help to tornado disasters, knowing that when we have our eventual massive need the 290/300ths of Tornado Alley that are on their feet can help us.
posted by clew at 12:05 PM on June 27, 2021