Wednesday's storms followed a deadly outbreak Tuesday in Arkansas, Oklahoma and Kansas that killed at least 15 people. The nation's deadliest single tornado since 1950 killed 125 on Sunday in the southwest Missouri city of Joplin.Joplin seems hit the worst so far:
Standing in a wreckage-strewn park across from a hospital that is now only a concrete shell, the mayor pro tem, Melodee Colbert-Kean, said that officials understood the need to be careful about how fast they moved forward. In addition to the considerable logistical challenges, there are the emotional considerations imbued in the splintered lumber, crushed brick and strewn personal possessions — as well as the remains of the missing.
“To a lot of people, it’s just rubble,” she said. “But to a whole bunch more, it’s lives.”
That rubble was once assembled neatly into more than 5,000 buildings stretching through nearly a third of the city. Now it is where at least 125 people died, the most in a single tornado since modern record-keeping began in the United States in 1950. It is a rolling junkyard presided over by the jagged forms of denuded trees. The mess revealed a prosthetic leg, a college thesis, a live guinea pig, an empty wheelchair, a pocket watch, and a child’s doll.
Still, even residents of the hardest-hit area seemed to carry a gloomy resignation about what was surely ahead. “What else can you do but bulldoze it?” said Anna Kent, 54, as she wandered through rubble that once was a friend’s home in search of missing items. “They ought to draw a perimeter around all of it and take it all. What else can you do?”
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