Joplin tornado sends store receipt record 525 miles to Indiana
A thunderstorm gathered Friday over a Joplin, Mo., neighborhood devastated by the tornado Sunday that killed at least 132 people. By Charlie Riedel, AP
By Michael Winter, USA TODAY May 27, 2011 05:03 PM
A receipt from a tire store in Joplin, Mo., turned up 525 miles away on a front porch in north-central Indiana, a record distance for apparent tornado debris to travel, a Purdue University storm researcher reports.
"This paper traveled more than twice as far as the longest distance recorded for debris from a storm," said Ernest Agee [ http://www.purdue.edu/discoverypark/climate/directory/view.php?id=3 ], professor of earth and atmospheric sciences and tornado expert [ http://www.eas.purdue.edu/mct/ ]. The previous record was a canceled check that traveled 210 miles after the 1915 tornado in Great Bend, Kan.
He told the university's news service [ http://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/index.html ] that to reach Indiana the receipt would have to have been sucked into the tornado and then carried by the jet stream for 12 1/2 hours.
Watching Joplin 'debris ball' on radar: ‘You really feel for the people out there’
The tornado's radar signal over Joplin, Missouri, last Sunday.
May 27th, 2011 11:52 AMET
When Gene Hatch reported to work at the National Weather Service’s Springfield, Missouri, office on Sunday afternoon, he knew it was going to be bad.
The national Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma, had updated its forecast for southwest Missouri from a slight risk to a moderate risk of severe weather - meaning a stronger possibility of thunderstorms, hail and tornadoes.
The storm eventually produced the deadliest tornado in recorded U.S. history – destroying much of Joplin, Missouri, killing at least 132 people and leaving 156 people missing or unaccounted for.
Hatch, a meteorologist at the Springfield office since 1999, was one of two radar operators on duty that day. He remembers watching as the tornado formed and passed over Joplin. He knew immediately it had been destructive.
“One of the things you can kind of see on radar is what’s called a ‘debris ball,’ where the actual reflectivity patterns on the radar will actually begin to show the debris that’s being lofted by the tornado.
“It looks like a little ball on the tail end of the hook,” he said. “And that was fairly evident fairly quickly as the storm moved through Joplin.”
As a professional, Hatch says, “you have to remain kind of detached from [your emotions] in order to do the job at the highest level of performance.”
But he admits it’s hard to overlook the human side of the drama.
He’s been part of it himself: In May 2003, a powerful tornado ripped through his home in Battlefield, Missouri, doing $45,000 worth of damage to his house.
He was at work that day; his family was home. He watched the radar as the tornado’s signature hook moved through his town. Fortunately, his family had found shelter in a neighbor’s basement.
“For me personally, it’s kind of emotional. You really feel for the people out there,” he said.
“From first-hand knowledge I know what people are going through right now and have an idea of what the devastation is out there. But at the same time, we’re here to do our job. We’re here to make sure other people are safe, and do the best we can to provide that information as quickly as possible.”
On Sunday, Hatch and his colleague, Eric Wise, watched as the storm that would hit Joplin moved across the region. For a time, there was little movement.
Then, suddenly, that changed.
“The storm initially developed and … just kind of kept sitting there and building,” Hatch recalled. “When it was finally able to take advantage of some more eastward movement is when the circulation in the storm began to really get going, and the farther it got east, the tighter that circulation got – in the whole storm, not just the tornadic portion of it.
“And as it did get moving toward the Missouri and Kansas state line is when the rotation really began to tighten up, and that was the point when we started putting out the tornado warnings for that storm.”
At 3 p.m., the Storm Prediction Center issued a tornado watch. At 4:30 the Springfield office, which is responsible for warnings – meaning severe weather has been sighted - started issuing severe thunderstorm and tornado warnings.
Wise put out the warning for the Joplin area at 5:17. The tornado touched down in Joplin 24 minutes later, at 5:41 p.m.
By that time, Hatch was monitoring a separate tornado created by the storm, one that passed northeast of the Missouri town of South West City, hard by the Oklahoma state line.
At 6:30 the warning for Joplin proper was lifted; a warning for areas east of the city expired at 7:10.
It was hard to let go, said Hatch.
“I left work at 2 a.m. and it took me until 4 a.m. to get to sleep,” he said. “I was then awake by 8 a.m., unable to sleep anymore.”
Officials report that in the past 24 hours, 90 people reported they're OK or were located, and 6 people from the "unaccounted for" list were confirmed to have been killed.
It appears, though, that in issuing the updated list today authorities also expanded it to 252 — that's the total of those still unaccounted for, plus those who have been found, plus the six now confirmed to have died.
So, while 30 [sic - 20] more names were added to the whole list, the good news is that 90 people have been located and are OK.
In that swath of the American flatland that has been so brutalized of late, a 93-year-old woman gave me a warning. She had lost her house as a little girl, a homestead property of timber-sheltered memories that shattered in a twister’s strike and took to the Oklahoma sky.
She had cautioned me to be wary of springtime — glorious days in a glorious stretch of prairie that can turn deadly on a dime. “Don’t get too far from a shelter.” Yes, yes, I’d heard plenty about hail the size of grapefruit and how the weather might kick up four things that could kill you — wildfire, blizzard, flash flood, tornado.
But it seemed quaint to these urban ears, a “Wizard of Oz” artifact from Dorothy’s pals on the farm. What I learned that afternoon in Tornado Alley is that nothing is more terrifying than a sky of robin’s-egg blue turning bruised and churlish, a moment that transforms trees and telephone poles into missiles.
The spring of 2011 is shaping up as one for all the wrong kind of records. Flooding, twisters, Texas wildfires, deaths by fast-moving air that has its own awful category known too well by millions — the Enhanced Fujita Scale, the worst being EF5, winds 200 m.p.h. or more. In a year when almost [actually, more than ( http://www.kansascity.com/2011/05/26/2905476/by-the-numbers-2011-tornado-season.html )] 500 Americans have died from tornadoes, and 60 or more twisters touch down in a single day, even the cable weather jockeys look humbled as they stand next to flattened neighborhoods.
April and May are the cruelest months, when systems and seasons collide, warm moist air at the surface meeting drier air higher up. Brewing, building, these tornadoes develop out of rotating thunderstorms called supercells.
For an outsider, when the radio suddenly goes into emergency broadcast mode and clouds bleed a ragged black, there is an instant that technical talk turns to terror. You feel exposed in a naked land. You feel a target. You think nothing is permanently anchored. You look for an overpass. You understand, somewhat, what it must have been like in wartime London when the sirens went off in advance of another bombing by the Germans. You feel helpless.
It is human to want to see these storms as part of a larger pattern, to anthropomorphize them with words like “nature’s wrath,” to ascribe a motive to the mayhem. But also something else: to see a warning of the oldest kind, dating to Greek mythology, a warning about hubris.
Earlier this year, Republicans in a congressional panel declared, by a majority vote, that climate change caused by humans does not exist. The majority of the House then voted to get rid of federal funding for the world’s finest scientists in the field to study the changing earth, through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Blink, blink, just like that — our representatives wished away the future.
The twisters, floods and fires of this year have another say, and remind us that some political gestures are no more relevant than a lone pair of lips flapping in the wind. Of course, among atmospheric scientists there is ambiguity, at best, about whether global warming has anything to do with the worst tornado season in modern times [(items linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=62623391 and preceding and following].
But the consensus of fair-minded research — ignored by those who assume to know better in the Republican Congress — is that an earth warmed by an excess of man-caused carbon emissions will cause more weather extremes. Warm air holds more water vapor than cold air — that’s an axiom that a congressman with a set of talking points paid for by Exxon cannot wish away. Torrential flooding in all parts of the world could easily be part of a new phase brought on by just a few upticks in ocean temperatures. The forecast is simple: You ain’t seen nothing yet.
To recognize this threat, even with its implicit calls for sacrifice in a country that cannot tolerate $4 a gallon gas, is not to be alarmist. The unknown — that is, any possible link between a surfeit of lethal tornadoes and a warmer planet — makes a case for proceeding with caution. We treat our bodies that way, most of us; when a warning comes out of possible cancer links to a food or substance, sensible people change course.
But there is a loud and intellectually corrupt segment of public life dedicated to fact-denial. They will not allow even a slim chance that humans are making a mess of this place. They will not do what a homeowner facing unlikely odds of a fire has to do just to hold a mortgage — take out insurance.
Listen to people who have lived long lives in the American midsection, a place of peril, and a place that is deeply loved. They tell us to be prepared, to be humble in the face of nature, to think about the worst thing that could come from the sky. If this is radical advice, then common sense has surely met an early death.
News 
Market Data 
Discover 
