jhamps10

Already looking more interesting than last winter in dfw... Delkus is already stirring up the hype machine on Twitter too about next week, i was like what the.... My ankle will probably be killing me Saturday night with that artic front!

Merry Christmas Jomo and to everyone in Joplin!

reading that letter to Santa, it's hard not to put tears in your eyes seeing it, I hope that the city can plant as many trees as possible to help bring back some shade if nothing else in the summertime!

Yes sir, I think Wendy's, Slumberland, and Macadoodles have all opened as well. It really helps that Joplin is the shopping hub for many of the areas around here. When you have 200-300,000 people that come to shop then it gives businesses incentive to rebuild back.

One thing I forgot to include in my update was the Joplin High School lip dub that was filmed by a hollywood cameraman. The media students did the casting, setting it up etc. This is the 11th-12th grade campus at the mall. They basically give you a tour of the school including the storm shelters outside. They are planning to do one for the 9th and 10th graders as well.

ya, that is a BIG incentive to rebuild as fast as possible, I'm just in awe seeing how things are coming back as fast as they are, it's still a LONG road to go, but y'all have really started getting back on your feet a lot quicker than I expected actually..

nice, glad to see the recovery is going on strong... Getting the Walmart back is a HUGE step..

I hate to say this, but man I almost in a way wished the STL tornado would have wiped everything clean... there are a lot of areas that have STILL basically not been touched since Good Friday's tornado in Bridgeton. While it will still take a long time for you to get everything back to normal, (if joplin ever does get back to the way it was) things are going faster out there than they are in the St Louis area that's for sure...

I just noticed something. This was quoted from the Severe thread as the tornado was happening. I'm not sure if there are archived tornado warnings somewhere.

See 6 miles NE of Galena?

Now check out the map on this page showing where the first point of touchdown was.

http://www.crh.noaa....11may22_summary

It's actually SE of E of Galena.

typo maybe???? but a typo that COULD i'm not going to blame SGF for the death of 140 some odd people... but it very well could have something to do with people saying they didn't have warning... i don't know.. that's a shocking and a bit scary find there JoMo

As I listen to more and more interviews with regards to how people fared in commercial structures, if is more and more clear that buildings with freezers/coolers or similar structures within the building provided a generally effective means of shelter. CNN had an interviews with people in the Dillon's who it appears all survived by getting the the cooler. Similar story in the Pizza Hut, except for an employee who perished trying to keep the door closed from the outside. As we know sadly those in the "big box" stores did not far so well. Lack of addtiional enclosure combined with the larger concentration of people were likely both contributing factors.

i'm not a building engineer by any means but a LOT of these big box stores are basically a big pole barn structure with block walls on it instead of the metal.. the roof is USUALLY just thin steel with the beams, VERY easy targets for tornadoes IMO, but yeah a lot of those freezer coolers are solid steel structures that are built to last.. very much an effective safe spot from a tornado

hard to really believe it's been a week already... I know for you it seems like the days have gone on and on this week JoMo... Here's hoping for a quiet rest of the severe wx season...

Yep, and if you want to see the 2 houses (the pics with the black car in it) Go to "2448 West 26th Street, Joplin, MO" and turn the camera around to the left and you can see that they are now gone and all that's left is the slabs.

that is just amazing... a brick home just wiped away clean like that, and that car is in the garage area, and the tornado just left the car.. Can't tell what kind of car it is from that far back but hey it's a strong one I'll say that...

i mean just to get the sheer prespective of this, This is the pic looking at St Johns as close as I could get to matching it up before last Sunday:

and then you have JoMo's pic:

I mean it's just crazy the power of this tornado, and getting to see that on a whole new level thanks to streetview kinda makes you feel like wow this is how powerful this tornado REALLY was...

The building was built to withstand 300 MPH winds. If the tornado had been a little bit bigger or stretched farther south, it would have knocked out both of our hospitals.

http://www.ky3.com/n...0,1937966.story

JOPLIN, Mo. -- Mercy Health System-St. John's Regional Medical Center said its hospital tower, severely damaged by the tornado last Sunday, will not be rebuilt. Structural engineers spent the week checking the structural integrity of the building. On Thursday, it was announced that, while the building is not at risk of collapse, the site remains “very dangerous.” Mercy said repairing and reoccupying the building is not a viable option.

exactly JoMo if that was just 2 blocks wider or even 2 blocks south both hospitals would have been a direct hit. Was Freeman just built or something, kinda makes little sense to me having it right across the street from St Johns, That however is exactly like how a couple of the hospitals are in St Louis with St Johns Mercy and Missouri Baptist, only thing separating them is hwy 40...

So that one of St Johns, you was taking that from basically right in front of the Elks lodge on 26th street? Just the before and after comparing with google streetview and this is just chilling of that area...

How far away from St Johns are you in this picture JoMo?

Word just down now that the death toll is up to 142 in Joplin

Here's a vid of the damage around the high school and Franklin Tech. At around 10-11 seconds on the left of the screen, you can see a parking lot and what looks like cars, just to the left of that is where Franklin Tech used to be, but there is nothing there at all. He turns down the street my ex-gf lives/lived on I believe and I think at the end of the video is what's left of her house although I am not sure. Her husband, step-daughter, and she were in either a bathroom or a closet and survived, some in this area were not so lucky she said as she saw a couple of people that did not make it.

wow that is amazing, yet chilling and scary video right there JoMo... just think how many people would have been in that high school had graduation been there instead of at the college.... from what I have heard graduation was just getting out when the sirens sounded, would have been a disaster of epic proportions if the ceremonies had been at the school

Franklin Tech was a brick building right across from the high school. There's nothing left of it now. I think the bricks are about ankle high. It was used to help determine the EF-5 rating.

I just read that 139 are now dead.

wow that is crazy to see a school just wiped off the map...

Turns out that report about the receipt being blown over 500 miles isn't true:

http://blogs.wlfi.co...t-from-tornado/

sounds like an honest mistake right there, that quite frankly if I had seen a receipt from Joplin I would likely have thought from the tornado myself..

but smart move by the family to call Purdue in, good to get the right picture though.

jhamps10: I know what you mean, we may suffer from 'warning fatigue' due to all the warnings. Storms happen a lot here, usually they are overnight storms from the MCS's that develop in the summer off the Rockies.

Most of the time, the tornadoes we do see are usually pretty weak due to the time of day and the distance they have traveled. (cold pool interactions, etc) This was just a 'perfect storm' type situation because the EF5 tornado lifted after only traveling 7 miles. The same area of storms produced again but the highest rating was an EF2 with that path length being 17 miles.

wintrymix: I know that several trailer parks have community shelters around here. Community shelters sound like a good idea, I'm just not sure how feasible they are.

I know comparing a city of 5000 to a city of 50,000 for community shelters is a much bigger story, but here the EMA has 3 or 4 community shelters scattered throughout Flora in different geographic areas depending on where you live, and the only issues we get here is people who are so adamant on bringing their dogs... and I don't mean little pugs or poodles, I know Wed mom and dad went to the shelter (I stayed back knowing that this one was going to be minor, but I was in a safe spot... just in case) and there was a guy with a pit bull in the shelter, anyway that's a whole other debate.

but I think with so much of Joplin taken out by the storm, I think it would be pretty easy to build in areas for community shelters in the rebuilding, but then again comes into the warning fatigue issue. although for a while I don't suspect you'll see a lot of people in Joplin NOT take a tornado warning seriously after what happened Sunday...

I've asked this too many times this year. But why in gods green earth are people that live in "TORNADO ALLEY" less educated than they should be? I mean. c'mon... It should be instilled in people from a young age about the dangers of these storms. I know this it's probably about 50-50 on percentages of people who know the dangers and the others. But it always seems that when people hear tornado warnings/sirens/watched that they don't take it as serious as they should And i;m not just talking about this event in Joplin, but all over the south. People in Florida and NC know about hurricane prepardness, west coast do the earthquake/wildfire thing, but i can't fathom some of the stories i hear.

WHoever said as they were heading out of Joplin, and warning people on the way in not to go, and they laugh it off. It's absurd... I know you can't fix stupid, but c'mon people.

I feel personally it's the tornado warning fatigue that they get in SW Missouri, now I don't mean to pile on the Springfield office here at all, but it's pretty well common knowledge that they are one of the most tornado warning happy offices in the entire NWS, and after a while of hearing warning after warning after warning when 80 some odd percent don't produce a tornado in the area warned, you start to get oh OK this one isn't real either...

JoMo I'm sure you've seen this hundreds of times, you watch a storm on GR or on tv, and SGF will go nearly blanket tornado warnings, and as soon as it gets into the Paducah or St Louis CWA guess what, they go with severe thunderstorm warnings or heck sometimes no warning at all...

Why do you find that interesting? There are a lot of tornado warnings here every year, most don't produce. Actually around May12th I believe it was, a storm showed signs of rotation just west of here, I actually saw the rotation in the sky and it may have produced a funnel, but it lifted off to the NE and never produced an actual tornado. The first thing that everyone here does is go outside and look for the tornado.

During the first tornado warning and round of sirens, about 6 of my neighbors were outside talking and looking around. Everybody took shelter during the second round of sirens which were activated just prior to the tornado hitting as you could hear the rumbling sound and see the extremely dark sky.

the thing that I found interesting is that by this point in the year Joplin is used to about a dozen different tornado warnings.... does not surprise me one bit that so many people were thinking oh just another warning to add to the evergrowing list. Which I think is PART of why when KSN showed the tornado on the tower cam that they starting getting REAL serious about it... like maybe Oh this one is REALLY real....

I find this interesting what you mentioned about oh just another tornado warning JoMo, the met at KSN there in Joplin is on James Spann's podcast Weatherbrains right now and he mentioned the EXACT same thing that by now you are used to about a dozen tornado warnings by now in a season so you get oh it's just another warning...

I don't post on this forum often, but it is good to see you are OK....

I can't even begin to imagine what it was like to experience what you experienced. And you going into the closet was something we actually talked about, because there are some of us who would have been tempted to run outside and see the thing.

I know you were very close, but did your house sustain any damage at all, and I know it is early, but what is the recovery plan like there? What is the general feeling on rebuilding? I mean, even after Katrina, a lot of places were still salvageable, and could be repaired. Here, they are just gone, with nothing left...How does a city recover from this.

Oh, and btw, I hope you don't think we are a bunch of stalkers

I've never been to Joplin in my entire life, but if it's like the rest of the midwest, it will take time yes, but I'm sure Joplin will recover, and end up being stronger than before. I know I was watching nightly news last night and already a hair salon was in the middle of rebuilding with all the debris around it, and were only 4-5 days post storm.... Joplin will be back, look at Greensburg for example, everyone thought oh they'll never come back, but sure enough abit slowly Greensburg is coming back...

wow that is crazy to have something carried that far, i'll tell you what it's making me look around here for little things just in case..

Thanks for the well wishes.

There was nothing weird that happened as I recall as far as ear popping or anything. I was running on adrenaline then so I don't really know. I was scared, but I wasn't shaking or anything. I still remember the sound and the loud low rumble. We just had a storm move through a few minutes ago and the rolling thunder kind of freaked me out.

The best thing for people wanting to volunteer and donate is to wait for a week or two when all the hype dies down and it is no longer national news and everyone who came in to volunteer leaves. We have a large church population here and the people are very giving so we aren't short on supplies at this time, but we may get that way in a week or two.

This radio station has been on the air since this happened. People were calling in and leaving their numbers for loved ones to find them, also various donation points. People also calling in offering their homes to complete strangers. "If you need a shower you can come to my place at *address*" You can listen to it online.

http://www.1310kzrg.com/

One of the radio personalities wives had a broken back, a couple of them have no home anymore. One has nothing, not even his wallet.

The tornado siren in this area is probably in some other state by now so they brought in temporary sirens which came in handy on Tues night I believe it was. We had another tornado warning issued but that storm never produced and the rotation remained just north of Joplin. The sirens blew a second time when the storm was indicated to have winds of 75 MPH so there were some tense moments but it never really produced. The emergency manager called into the radio station to update people as the storm was moving through.

Looking at the aerial photographs that were taken, I just can't help but notice how intense and tightly wound it was. I mean, in some cases the difference between a building that was leveled and one that has minimal damage was a block or two.

JoMo that's why our church is collecting donations for a solid month and then we'll be sending them down your way.

JoMo what an amazing story you told us,

Funny you mention about SGF and tornado warnings, it's a joke that me and Beau have as well, and as a member of the 3 block away club myself I know that freight train sound, heard it in 97, although when I heard that freight train sound, that's what I thought it was.... a freight train, well it would have been that had the tornado not derailed it just outside of town.

and on the smell of fresh cut wood, that too is a very normal smell, I know a lot of the first people on scene in Tuscaloosa mentioned that very same thing, just glad your ok and still among us, and just like I thought in 97 i'm sure you feel VERY lucky that you lived there instead of 3 blocks away..

that's exactly right Macintosh, Monday night after the tornado the st louis stations were doing fundraiser telethons for Joplin, here in Flora our church is collecting donations and money, help is coming from all over for Joplin, and SW Missouri as a whole.