We'll jump back into the Joplin tornado. So we're gonna change it up a bit this time. We're gonna start off with the final clip the aftermath of the storm, and then I'll pick back up and we'll finish off. Sounds good to me. There are people that are there, got to be answered right now, Josh, Their people fatalities right now, people are trapped, Josh, that used to be here, they're totally gone. This is bad. My gosh, this is bad. Oh my gosh. Okay, are you talking to Kena? What I wanted to do? Where? I don't know? Looking around, I don't know. Look at that that is destroyed completely. We're gonna turn around. Oh my gosh, oh oh oh, you have through that way. Ye see we come in the bullet watch see why that is gone? Break above? Oh no, my dad, one, I love. I cannot believe this. The lady out with a broken back, broadcasting live from the darkened k d r G twenty four hour Storm Center. Power is out. We are running a backup generators at this hour. I understand whether I got alication that the hospitals were in from here, I'm trying to get to that side of town. There's just people Joshua done stobbing hundred. A woman was reportedly seeing an X ray X rays in her front yard, and that just gives you a visual to how far this damage is reaching. But if you think this is bad, check out this over here. This is a neighborhood that is completely flattened by this tornado. There are dozens of people walking up and down the street trying to figure out it through. We have sustained a major direct hit here in Joplin. Now, Chad, you've described some damage and we're trying to understand the situation. And as we can understand it now, Joplin will never be the same after this tornadic event. And when I was twenty fourth and Main, I could look all the way to the west and all the way to the east, and I saw no structure stand up and they're still yeah. I don't recognize where I'm at right now. I don't tak a blue lip soon. Don't want to ride somewhere, dude, I don't want I don't I don't know if I want to go here. I don't know. I don't want to be somebody can help, don help, thank We have picture all right, here's the gas station that we were at. We parked right over there. Our car got blown away. The front door was just right there. The job of tornado was getting where from a half mile to three quarter a mile wide at its widest point, and was on the ground for about thirteen miles. Approximately seventy five hundred homes were damaged. Okay, after math and impact of the jop On tornado. A preliminary survey of the tornado damage by the National Weather Service office in Springfield began on May twenty third. The following day, the initial survey confirmed a violent rated EF four damage. Surveys, however, found evidence of more intense damage as the tornado was upgraded to an EF five with winds between two hundred and twenty five to two hundred and fifty miles an hour. This is actually an interesting thing because for some reason, don't I don't know why, there's a lot of rating disputes on that, and we'll get to that here a little bit, but this seemed to be a common thing where the rating if this thing was actually an EF five or not. But obviously the damage was crazy. The scope of the damage was immense. According to a local branch of the American Red Cross. About twenty five percent of Joplin was destroyed, though emergency officials reported some level of damage to about seventy five percent of the city. A week after the tornado, Joplins mayor estimated that twenty five percent of the businesses licensed in the city were damaged or destroyed. Nine hundred and sixty four buildings were damaged in Joplin, including seven four hundred and eleven residential buildings and five hundred and fifty three non residential. At least thousand, seven hundred and thirty four of those buildings, including three one hundred and eighty one residential buildings and all five hundred and fifty three to none were non residential buildings, sustained so much damage they were considered destroyed from an insurance standpoint. According to the FEMA Federal Emergency Management Agency, two hundred and sixty four homes were impacted and of those, eight hundred and eighty four were significantly damaged and four thy three hundred and eighty were considered destroyed. So this is some damage to the infrastructure of Joplin. Tornado also severely damaged critical infrastructure to the city, hampering emergency response and recovery efforts we talked about the two of the main three fire stations were completely destroyed. Two hospitals both had damaged, one destroyed, and approximately four thousand electrical distribution poles were damaged. More than one hundred and ten miles of distribution line brought down, one hundred and thirty five transmission towers affected. All the electrical work in the path was basically destroyed. Twenty thousand people were left without power, and of those home left without power, they didn't get the back till about ten to twelve days later, which is huge. The cost of rebuilding just the electrical system was calculated to be about twenty six twenty seven million dollars to the infrastructure of electricity. The tornado also caused about four thousand leaks and water service lines, dropping Joplin's water system pressure below operating level. Approximately three thousand, five hundred gas meters and fight and fifty five thousand feet of gas maine were damaged, and it took weeks to get to every gas leak figure out where they're all coming from. Some damaged mains could not be shut off because they were serving in critical facilities like the healthcare systems. The loan remaining hospital and Joplin obviously couldn't shut everything off because of you need at the hospital. Twenty one cell phone towers were down and fiber cables damaged. Cellular communications rendered useless, disabling voice calls and texts. Insurance. An early estimate from the catastrophic risk modeling from Equate placed the insurance losses from the tornado at three billion dollars USD. By mid June, more than nineteen thousand insurance claims had been filed, a number that eventually rose to sixty one thousand, a total payout for more than two billion dollars, thirty one percent going to homeowners, five percent to those who lost vehicles. The impact of the insurance industry was not so much due to the number of claims, but the cumulative effect of such a large number of total losses. In those claims, more than twenty five hundred local people employed and insurance were involved in some capacity. The two point eight billion dollars in damage is the largest amount for a tornado since nineteen fifty casualties. We talked about this earlier. The official death toll from the National Weather Service listed at one hundred and fifty eight, while the city at Joplin listed at one hundred and sixty one. Shortly after the tornado, authorities had listed thirteen hundred people as missing. The number quickly dwindled down as they were accounted for. Many people were reported to have been trapped in destroyed houses. Nearly thirty people were actually rescued the following day after this tornado. That happened at six pm, so the following day they had been trapped there the whole day they were rescued. Of the one hundred and forty six sets of remains recovered from the rebel, one hundred and thirty four victims have been positively identified, so not even all identified. This total number included four sets of partial remains, some of which had been longer to the same person. A couple weeks later they identified four more people. Of course, there were people that you know, banished in this completely infants and terrible things like that. The Joplin Globe reported that fifty four percent of the people killed in that were killed died in the residents, thirty two percent diet and non residential areas, and fourteen percent died in vehicles or outdoors. Job one officials after the tornado, announced plans to require that they submitted this proposal hurricane ties or other fasteners between houses of their foundations, something that would cost about seven hundred dollars per house. Officials rejected this to have these be a requirement in basements, and they also rejected in a proposal of having basements being a requirement in new houses. Officials strangely noted that as of two two thousand and nine, only twenty eight percent of job ones new homes had basements, compared to thirty eight percent two decades before. But it's important to note also that a lot more population increased and that than the previous survey. Injuries range from cuts, bruises to impaalments by large debris. To the conclusion of that oney, five hundred people were injured and or severely injured enough to seek medical treatment. It also says that they rescued nearly one thousand pets, with two hundred and ninety two almost three hundred homeowners rating dispute. Like I said, the American Society of Civil Engineers and the National Weather Service went back and forwards on if this was an EF four EF five. National Weather Service kind of got the last gets the last call here. They do agree with the civil engineers that at a lot of the damage was equivalent to EF three e F four throughout it, But there was certainly things that happened in several areas, even though they may have been small areas, that were undeniably EF five if you go off of the capability of it. Example, the manhole cover, what was able to do with impalement? That debate went down as a EF five one was all said done, Yeah, okay, So just to go into that, concrete being removed, manhole covers, reinforce porches, driveways, asphalt being ripped from the earth, the presence of wind road structured debris, instances of very large vehicles such as buses, vans, and semi trucks being thrown hundreds of yards or several blocks from their original points of origin, the fact that some homeowners actually never really relocated their vehicles again, and the overwhelming extent and totality the destruction were also put into consideration to finalize that as any F five. Here's some facts on the cleanup. The Joplin tornado generated an estimated three million cubic yards of debris and amount sufficient to cover a football field one hundred and twenty stories high. Removal efforts lasted for months, and at their height, more than four hundred and ten trucks a day were removing debris to landfills and Joplin as well as nearby counties. The tornado also led to a renewed lead contamination on many of Joplin's properties. Because if you remember, we went back to the beginning the story, that's what this area was founded on lead and development of that. So the reason it was able to kind of lead to this reoccurring of lead contamination here is because there's a lot of ruminiscce of this and underground trees, foundations, stuff like that, and it was actually uprooted, and they found about forty percent of the yards and southern Joplin had been contaminated. Chunks of raw lead were in some places. They were sitting around the size of tennis balls or golf balls. The city spent more than five million just to clean up this lead contamination. They had to get grants to do so. Basically they had to handle this seriously, removing the lead, cleaning the topsoil, putting new top soil down, and of course they had to pass requirements before, like anything that could be rebuilt had to be tested before it could be. FEMA maintained a large presence after this following the tornado, with as many as eight hundred and twenty employees working in the city. The city warned by federal officials that it should expect to lose twenty five percent of its population following the tornado. They actually responded pretty quickly, though, and built an average of five houses a week between twenty eleven and twenty twenty two. Most businesses reopen and more than three hundred new businesses opened between these last was it twelve years? And here's the last interesting fact here. There was some conversation about the mental health impact that it had. There were twenty people they said, committed suicide and the wake of this and obviously had a big impact on the mental health for the residents for quite a while, and I'm sure to this day it's not something that you know, goes away. Calls about domestic violence grew for the less next several years, much higher than they were post this tornado. That's rough, really bad. Yeah, everybody's standing. They need of storms shelter after that. Yeah, Yeah, that was a lot of debris. They said, how many football field high one hundred and twenty stories high, one hundred yards wide, hundred and twenty stories high. This doesn't even make sense, no, But but when you look at the video that we watched, you can see how it would easily be that. Now. I would do want to talk about that video a little bit because it did a good job of grasping severity of the situation. So the person a couple people, but one comment really stood out to me said, I don't even know where I'm at. Yeah. Now, so imagine you went outside right now and everything was just wiped out right, you wouldn't know where you're at. There's no street signs, there's no structures standing right, How would you know where you're actually at? Yeah? That's that is crazy. One thing you were talking about there was they thought about passing like the requirement to have hurricane ties to prevent debris and stuff like that, and it'd be like seven hundred dollars per building. When you said that, I was like, man, hurri getting ties it? What those are? What? I looked it up while you're reading. I bought these things for my SHD for the rafters. They're a bucket piece. Yeah, I don't know, it says to the foundation. I don't know what all that consists of. They're they're for you could use it for like basically everything, but basically tying it in a certain way to something else to just prevent it from flying off. And yeah, it ties like the floor joists to the foundation or the rafters to the Yeah frame, how how cheap can you be too? You know, well to not They try to also go as extreme and you can call it extreme or not extreme as to make it where you had to have a basement in any new house that didn't get passed. I'm not surprised. That's a pretty that's a significant increase, but makes you see why in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, they have much more strict requirements on building codes and much higher rate of shelters. What did it so? Interesting enough? Here also the number of basements being put in new homes that actually decreased from the two decades prior. What do you think that is? When I looked at it, I thought it was probably because a pretty booming population, so building a lot of homes just didn't put basements in them. Yeah, huh, she's so much sunpacked there. It's just weird that you know they wouldn't. There are some things that are makes sense to add in, and something like hurricane ties cheap add for future buildings that should have been a requirement. After that, you talk about how this compares to hurricane that's like it's like eighty ninety mile an hour. No, no, but okay, so there's nothing with that powerful in the world as a tornado that we just talked about, Well, it's the equivalent of a bomb, atomic bomb. But the problem with the hurricane is its sustain winds can last twenty four hours, can last twelve hours, yeah, which makes it very deadly, right, you know what I mean, that countless surge, right, yeah, yeah, but this event is quick, this tornado when tornado happens. But I think this is so scary to me because you're really powerless. You can do. You can get these hurricane ties and stuff, but from the way it looked at some of these neighborhoods, they're just all wiped out. Yeah no, yeah, there was no stop in that. I think the idea is to prevent flying debris exactly. No, you're right, because that's becomes the most dangerous thing yeah, and they talked about all the different number of people that went to the hospital with impalement. And when I was editing a lot of this footage, there was a nurse talking about some of the different things she saw that we're stuck in people. Is terrifying. Can't imagine just from the wind, different vibe tonight on your scary stories. But yeah, a truly terrifying story. And I have never been seen a tornado. You've never been in one? What did you say? You say you've never been in one. I've never actually seen one either. I've been about four miles away from one when I was in southern Indiana, but I didn't see it, and it was F one or two. It was not like this. Obviously, there was this one time. I'm not harm so certain it was a tornado. It probably wasn't. They never officially said it was. But I was in the restaurant and the roof got peeled off the top, and I do know for a fact that I felt like the windows were going to explode at one point, and so like it may have just been a straight line wind that was this out of control, yeah, or it was like a lolo or tornado that touched down for a split second and then ripped it off and went away. But yeah, this like this is like what we just saw was like hand of God level. Uh yeah, how many miles? How long was this thing? Cach It said it was touchdown in a mile wide for about sixteen miles of going across you said earlier it was going at ten miles an hour. At one point it is going ten miles an hour was just slow. So that was like almost an hour or something like that that it was going through that area. Yeah, so that okay, So aerial surveys when you go back and they showed that they're at the end of the video, are insane, A drone, helicopter, whatever you want to look at it with. Yeah, twenty one miles long and up to a mile wide. This thing stayed on the ground for twenty one miles and we actually, you go back to earlier, the first part of this, you actually got to see it develop on camera, which, yeah, I don't want to say was pretty cool. But it went from a tiny It went from like a normal tornado to this, like you said, an act of God, this monster in seconds. Yeah, that was ridiculous. Yeah, I've seen some footage before, but I never saw all that like aftermath or anything like that, or even like the during of it. And so some of that photage there was just absolutely terrifying to look at and just it makes you what you feel bad watching it, but it also makes you count your blessings that you've done. You're not if you're not there. Yeah, a lot of people said that they referred to what the scene that they saw as people walking like zombies down the street with very like a few possessions they found. I could see that. What did you think about the infrastructure? How it mentioned that That's something I guess you don't typically think about right when you think it, right, all those gas lines and everything that are ruptured and everything water, gas and electrical. It just decimated the electrical infrastructure in that town. I mean this stuff one hundred and ten miles of distribution power line. Yeah, stuff like that takes forever roof fix you, uh, And so that being destroyed that also slows down the repairs, right, because if you don't have access to power to do things, you can't fix things. No. Today, there was a lot of people on the when I researched this that were talking about how they were trying to get they were out of town and they were trying to get back home into Joplin after this one. They didn't know where they're at. There's no street signs, and that's something you kind of take for granted when you don't have anything to reference. And two there was so much debris. Couldn't even get to your house. Yeah, they people talked about parking half a mile away and walking there. You don't even know what you're out walk to. Like, well, in that one reference that guy said when he looked in two different directions, is nothing. Yeah, all. And then they showed that neighborhood outside of the hospital gone gone. It's like there's nothing to go back to, it's gone. And that is insanity to me. It's like you think about it's like what would you even do? Like can you process? That's why I'm not surprised at the like they said, the increase in suicides and stuff like that. Yeah, stuff like that takes a toll on human human beings that is just hard to quantify. And it's like being at war. It's like you said, a bomb. Yeah, that's why everybody kept saying, it's like a bomb destroyed everything. There was a there was a what did you think about the pizza hut manager that was killed? That's terrify you can see, like trying to get everybody into a safe place. That was actually a really sad part. I was thinking about that. I was thinking about, you know, walkings that've been in and it's like they're a pretty structurally Usually they're a good place to put the girl. They have wall there in the middle of the place. Yeah, I mean yeah, but there they are so big and so like, you know, you try to save everybody and you're not gonna have that kind of room. Yeah. No, I've never seen a walk in that could fit the amount of people he was trying to put in there. One story I heard and I didn't I didn't play it. Sure, it is incredibly sad, You're sad stories tonight was they were looking for their baby and there's so many random sounds, toys going off, it's about impossible to locate anything. So they weren't able to. But another interesting thing come from this was what it did to the animals that were there, the horses, the cows. Yeah, they would just say you could hear shots in the distance, just some of them couldn't be saved, but they're so badly hurt. But it's like just so much of an impact that you never think about. That's why I thought, like, this is sad, as tragic as can be. And kudos to this community. It sounds like they're strong as hell and they've made a big comeback. Yeah, but it's it's it's sad, but it's more than anything, it's scary, like this could happen where I'm at in Indiana, this could happen where you're at. This could happen at a lot of places, but there's just nothing that prepares you for it. Yeah. Absolutely, Yeah, I kind of want to go there sometimes just to see what kind of a community can rebound from something like that. There's obviously some things will never be replaced for the life and all that, Yeah, you can't ever replace that, and nothing will ever go back to being the exact same. It's just a new normal now and they're definitely making a go over. Though it's important to note also that there has to be a learning experience from this because way too many people died. I mean, that is an abnormal, insane This was an abnormal and saint storm. But that is a very large amount of fatalities. Yeah, so you hope, and I'm sure there's a lot of things that were taken away from this. I watch a lot of air crash investigators to airplanes. A lot something comes out of every crash, right regulation of finding. You just hope that in this particular instance that something would come out of that because there we talked to Oklahoma City. They have had several yeah fives, right, but not this fatality level typically. I mean, could be I could be speaking out of my mind. There's some big ones, but with a twenty minute warning, which is pretty sufficient. However, it's scary because there's just nothing you could do. You could drive, hope you drove the right way. I guess you could try to drive away fast. It wasn't a very fast moving storm. It was between forty and ten miles an hour. You got to think about it though, that I'm sure, and I know a lot of other tornado stories the road dude. First of all, if you're behind the eight ball, you can't get around the debris. But everybody trying to leave at the same time as problematic to you when something like that, there's just no real good answer. Jeff Townsend Media sees you good night, and the question is do I stay here? Will you be back? Are you gonna come back? Will you be back? Are you coming back?
