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That, combined with the already high false-alarm rate inherent to tornado warnings (a national average of 74%), fueled a distrust in the siren system. One of the key insights Kuligowski gleaned from 140 interviews was that the city audibly tested its sirens on a weekly basis. How did the tornado affect them? What emergency communications did they get, and how did they respond?” said Kuligowski, now a Vice-Chancellor’s Senior Research Fellow at RMIT University in Australia. I went from person to person and asked about what happened that day. “I walked through neighborhoods and visited some tents that FEMA put up. So why were so many people caught in the line of fire? To find out, Kuligowski and her colleagues engaged with town officials and spoke to as many survivors as they could meet. And the city engaged its siren system twice. The NWS’s warning for the entire city clocked in at 17 minutes before the tornado touched down, allotting residents several minutes more lead time than the average for the nation. That wasn’t the case for some Joplin residents who, just days earlier, were caught in the whirlwind. The two had a close call, even though they had a NOAA radio on hand and took immediate action. The pair sheltered in the basement of a college science building until the threat had passed. We were right in the tornado’s projected path, so we high-tailed it,” Levitan said. “I typed ‘college’ into my GPS since those campuses typically have more robust structures, and we found a small college only a few miles away. Knowing they were vulnerable on the road, the pair quickly sought refuge.

Their NOAA weather radio - a special radio that can receive NWS alerts and warnings - told them a tornado was on the ground nearby, in the town of Sedalia. Marc Levitan, the lead investigator, and Erica Kuligowski, a NIST sociologist and fire protection engineer at the time, were driving along the highway when they heard a distinct tone. Emergency Communication Is Keyįour NIST researchers - three engineers and one social scientist - were on the ground in Missouri within two days of the tornado, but severe weather still lingered.

The experts conducted their investigation of the Joplin tornado under the National Construction Safety Team Act (NCST), which grants NIST and its teams the authority to access disaster sites, subpoena evidence and take other actions. has the greatest number of tornadoes per year. And among all of the nations around the world, the U.S.

Tornadoes in general are deadly phenomena, so much that since 1950 they have caused more deaths than hurricanes and earthquakes combined. And the $2.8 billion in damages made it the costliest.Īlthough the Joplin tornado was far from a run-of-the-mill event, it was one of several cataclysmic tornadoes in that spring alone. since the National Weather Service (NWS) began official record-keeping in 1950. The high number of fatalities made it the deadliest single tornado in the U.S. Late in the afternoon, a tornado rated as the most intense on the Enhanced Fujita (EF) Scale, an EF5, cut a 6-mile-long (9.7-kilometer) gash through the densely populated Joplin metro area, home to more than 50,000 people.ĭespite the city’s track record of following the latest building codes and the dissemination of warnings beforehand, the tornado - with winds estimated at more than 200 miles (321 kilometers) per hour at times - killed 161, injured over 1,000 and wrecked more than 8,000 buildings, including a major hospital and other critical facilities. Thousands gathered for a high school graduation ceremony.īut as the atmosphere swirled above, catastrophe brewed.

People attended church services and ate at restaurants with friends and family. For many residents of Joplin, Missouri, May 22, 2011, started out like any other Sunday.