Instruct: Given a question, retrieve passages that can help answer the question.
Query: What year did the Joplin tornado happen?
The Joplin School District is located in Jasper and Newton Counties in the City of Joplin, Missouri. It serves more than 7,700 students in the school district.On May 22, 2011, an EF5 tornado ripped through Joplin, Missouri. In the path of the tornado, Joplin High School, Franklin Technical Center, East Middle School, Irving Elementary, and Emerson Elementary were destroyed; Cecil Floyd Elementary, Duquesne Elementary, Eastmorland Elementary, and Kelsey Norman were damaged as well. In the months after the tornado, plans have been made to rebuild all schools that were destroyed in the tornado. The school district re-opened its Middle and Elementary schools on January 9, 2014; and Joplin High School and Franklin Technical Center re-opened in August 2014.
Three people were killed and 133 reported injured. One of the fatalities was thrown by the tornado from her home to a backyard four or five houses away. Debris was found miles away. Over 4,000 buildings were damaged and 287 were destroyed. In terms of damage, it was the costliest tornado in American history to that date, with damages costing at least $250 million to $300 million (around $1.7 billion in 2015 dollars), and insurance costs estimated at up to $1.1 billion (in 1975). It was the third-costliest tornado, behind the Oklahoma City-area F5 tornado on May 3, 1999, and the Wichita Falls, Texas, tornadoes on April 10, 1979, until the Joplin, Missouri EF5 tornado on May 22, 2011. It is now currently the seventh-costliest tornado on record.
There were no building codes requiring tornado shelters nor specifically designed to prevent tornado damage until the 2011 Joplin tornado prompted a local ordinance requiring hurricane ties or similar fasteners. The state of Oklahoma adopted the minimum U.S. standard that year for the first time, but did not add high-wind protections like those in Florida designed to protect against hurricanes. Other states in Tornado Alley have no statewide building codes. The chance of any given location in Tornado Alley getting hit by an F-2 tornado (strong enough to do major structural damage and exceeding the 90 mph guideline for straightline winds) is about 1 every 4,000-5,000 years; in other areas the annual probability is one in several million. The most stringent building codes only require earthquake strengthening for a 1 in every 500-1,000 year probability.
In the wake of the 2011 Joplin tornado in which seven people were killed in a Home Depot when the panel walls collapsed after the store was hit by an EF5 tornado, engineers in an article published in "The Kansas City Star" criticized the practice. They said that once one wall falls, it creates a domino effect. Twenty-eight people in an un-reinforced training room in the back of the building survived. According to a study of the collapse, the tornado hit the south corner of the store and lifted the roof up causing the west walls to collapse into the store. The walls on the east side (where the people survived) collapsed out. Only two walls remained standing. Engineers said that stronger roof-to-wall connections might have tempered the collapse. Two other big box stores at the corner that had concrete block construction (an Academy Sports and Walmart) lost their roofs but the walls remained intact. Those buildings were not directly hit by the tornado but the Home Depot building suffered a direct hit. Three people died in the Walmart, but 200 survived. The engineers told the Star that when concrete blocks fail they usually break apart, and do not come down in huge slabs. Home Depot, which has hundreds of stores built with tilt-up, said it disagreed with the finding and that it would use tilt-up when it rebuilt the Joplin store.
As of May 2013, the official death toll from National Weather Service was listed at 158 while the City of Joplin listed the death toll at 161 (158 direct). The list was up to 162, until one man's injuries were found to be unrelated to the event. In one indirect fatality, a policeman was struck by lightning and killed while assisting with recovery and cleanup efforts the day after the storm. Shortly after the tornado, authorities had listed 1,300 people as missing, but the number quickly dwindled as they were accounted for. Many people were reported to have been trapped in destroyed houses. Seventeen people were rescued from the rubble the day after the tornado struck.
The Missouri Emergency Management Agency reported more than 990 injured. Of 146 sets of remains recovered from the rubble, 134 victims had been positively identified by June 1. Due to the horrific injuries suffered by some victims, some different sets of remains were from a single person. On June 2 it was announced that four more victims had died.
In 2012, she released "Heartland: A Portrait of Survival." The film documents the effects of the 2011 Joplin tornado which destroyed a quarter of the city and caused about $2.8 billion worth of damage. Tremblay, who was living in Los Angeles at the time but had previously lived in Joplin, had relatives still living in her hometown. She traveled to the town with a film crew and documented the aftermath for a four-week period. The film, which features several stories like the Joplin Found Photos project, was shown at the Omaha Film Festival, and at St. Louis International Film Festival.
In total, this tornado killed 72 people, all in Alabama. This made it the deadliest single tornado ever to strike the state of Alabama as well as (at the time) the deadliest in the United States since the 1955 Udall, Kansas tornado that killed 80 people. This death toll would go on to be exceeded by the Joplin EF5 tornado less than a month later. Damage from the tornado amounted to $1.29 billion, making this one of the costliest tornadoes in U.S. history. This tornado also had the longest track of any tornado in the outbreak, with its path extending across Northern Alabama and into Tennessee.
This was the deadliest tornado recorded in Oklahoma since an F5 tornado killed 107 people in Woodward on April 9, 1947. It was also the deadliest tornado ever recorded in the Oklahoma City metropolitan area; the previous record was held by an F4 tornado that affected southwestern portions of the city on June 12, 1942, killing 31 people and causing $500,000 in damage ($ million in (2022 USD) when adjusted for inflation). It was the costliest tornado in US history until an EF4 tornado hit Tuscaloosa and northern portions of Birmingham, Alabama on April 27, 2011, causing an estimated $2.45 billion in damage (, the Bridge Creek–Moore tornado is the fourth-costliest tornado, having been surpassed by the EF5 tornadoes that hit Joplin on May 22, 2011, and areas of Moore near the 1999 storm track on May 20, 2013). National Weather Service researchers estimated that the death toll from the storm would likely have exceeded 600 had it not been for the advanced warning through local television and radio stations and exercising proper safety precautions.
Overall, the tornado killed 158 people (with an additional three indirect deaths), injured some 1,150 others, and caused damages amounting to a total of $2.8 billion. It was the deadliest tornado to strike the United States since the 1947 Glazier–Higgins–Woodward tornadoes, and the seventh-deadliest overall.
36 people died in this tornado, and over 8,000 homes were badly damaged or destroyed. The tornado caused $1 billion in damage, making it the second-costliest tornado in U.S. history, and the most costly in history from 1999 to 2011, at which point it was surpassed by the 2011 Tuscaloosa–Birmingham tornado and again by the 2011 Joplin tornado. It was also the deadliest tornado to hit the U.S. since the April 10, 1979 F4 tornado that hit Wichita Falls, Texas, which killed 42 people.
The United States averaged 1,274 tornadoes per year in the last decade. April 2011 saw the most tornadoes ever recorded for any month in the US National Weather Service's history, 875; the previous record was 542 in one month. It has more tornadoes yearly than any other country and reports more violent (F4 and F5) tornadoes than anywhere else.
Since 1850, only seven tropical cyclones have brought gale-force winds to the Southwestern United States. They are: The 1858 San Diego hurricane that was reconstructed as just missing landfall in 1858, the 1939 Long Beach tropical storm that made landfall near San Pedro in 1939, the remnants of Tropical Storm Jennifer-Katherine in 1963, the remnants of Hurricane Emily in 1965, the remnants of Hurricane Joanne in 1972, the remnants of Hurricane Kathleen in 1976, and Hurricane Nora in 1997, after it was downgraded to a tropical storm.
In 1865, the Missouri Pacific railroad reached Kansas City. At the time, Kansas City was similar in population to Independence and Leavenworth, Kansas. That was to change in 1867, when Kansas City defeated Leavenworth (then over twice Kansas City's size) for the Hannibal & St. Joseph Railroad bridge over the Missouri River. The Hannibal Bridge, designed by Octave Chanute, opened in 1869. With that, the city's population quadrupled in fifty years.
The city of Warsaw began in 1814, when young Major Zachary Taylor founded Fort Johnson on the eastern bank of the Mississippi River across from the mouth of the Des Moines River. Fort Johnson was occupied only for a few weeks before it was burned. In 1815 another military camp, Fort Edwards, was built nearby at a different location. Warsaw became an important fur trading post and one of the earliest American settlements in northern Illinois.
The Midwestern states are very prone to tornado activity, as they are part of "Tornado Alley." States included in the area that are hit by tornadoes the most are Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Iowa, and South Dakota. The Midwestern States are often hit by tornadoes during the late spring and early summer months, especially the months of May and June. This is due to the aforementioned air mass moving northward into the Midwest and combining with another air mass that move southward from Canada. This creates unstable air, creating the potential for storms to strike the most during these months. The frequency begins to decrease in the middle of the summer, as the air mass moves northward into the Great Lakes states.
On December 7, 1993, the city's Merillon Avenue station was the location of the Long Island Rail Road massacre in which six people were murdered and 19 injured in a racially motivated mass shooting perpetrated by Colin Ferguson, a black Jamaican immigrant.
New Orleans was catastrophically affected by what Raymond B. Seed called "the worst engineering disaster in the world since Chernobyl", when the Federal levee system failed during Hurricane Katrina in 2005. By the time the hurricane approached the city at the end of August 2005, most residents had evacuated. As the hurricane passed through the Gulf Coast region, the city's federal flood protection system failed, resulting in the worst civil engineering disaster in American history. Floodwalls and levees constructed by the United States Army Corps of Engineers failed below design specifications and 80% of the city flooded. Tens of thousands of residents who had remained were rescued or otherwise made their way to shelters of last resort at the Louisiana Superdome or the New Orleans Morial Convention Center. More than 1,500 people were recorded as having died in Louisiana, most in New Orleans, while others remain unaccounted for. Before Hurricane Katrina, the city called for the first mandatory evacuation in its history, to be followed by another mandatory evacuation three years later with Hurricane Gustav.
It has also been asserted that there are numerous Tornado Alleys. In addition to the Texas/Oklahoma/Kansas core, such areas include the Upper Midwest, the lower Ohio Valley, the Tennessee Valley and the lower Mississippi valley. Some studies suggest that there are also smaller tornado alleys located across the United States.
On August 14, the Northeast blackout of 2003, a wide-area power failure in the northeastern US and central Canada, affected over 55 million people.
On September 11, 2001, Port Authority Police Officers John McLoughlin and Will Jimeno are patrolling the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Midtown Manhattan when they see a plane fly dangerously low overhead. As all of the Police return to the station, they see on TV that the North Tower of the World Trade Center has been hit by the plane. Sergeant McLoughlin assigns many of the officers to assist in a precautionary evacuation attempt of the North Tower and they board a Metropolitan Transit Authority bus. On the bus, they hear reports that the South Tower is also hit by another plane. When they arrive at the World Trade Center, they realize the extent of the disaster, and see one of the victims jump out of the towers to certain death. The men proceed to get safety equipment from Building 5 and enter the concourse between the towers.
On January 15, 2010, Johnson & Johnson announced a voluntary recall of several hundred batches of popular medicines, including Benadryl, Motrin, Rolaids, Simply Sleep, St. Joseph Aspirin and Tylenol. The recall was due to complaints of a musty smell suspected to be due to contamination of the packaging with the chemical 2,4,6-tribromoanisole. The full health effects of 2,4,6-tribromoanisole are not known but no serious events have been documented in medical literature. The recall came 20 months after McNeil first began receiving and investigating consumer complaints about moldy-smelling bottles of Tylenol Arthritis Relief caplets, according to the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The recall included 53 million bottles of over-the-counter products including Tylenol, Motrin and Rolaids, Benadryl and St. Joseph's Aspirin, involving lots in the Americas, the United Arab Emirates and Fiji.
The tornado initially touched down just east of the Missouri-Kansas state line near the end of 32nd Street at 5:34 pm CDT (22:34 UTC) and tracked due east, downing a few trees at EF0 intensity. Eyewitnesses and storm chasers reported multiple vortices rotating around the parent circulation in that area. Civil defense sirens sounded in Joplin 20 minutes before the tornado struck in response to a tornado warning issued by the National Weather Service, but many Joplin residents didn't heed them. The tornado strengthened to EF1 intensity as it continued through rural areas towards Joplin, snapping trees and power poles and damaging outbuildings. Widening, the tornado then tracked into the more densely populated southwest corner of the city near the Twin Hills Country Club. It heavily damaged several homes at a subdivision in this area at EF1 to EF2 strength. The tornado continued to strengthen as it ripped through another subdivision just east of Iron Gates Rd. Numerous homes were destroyed at EF2 to EF3 strength at that location, and multiple vehicles were tossed around, some of which were thrown on or rolled into homes.
The now massive wedge tornado then crossed S. Schifferdecker Ave., producing its first area of EF4 damage as several small but well-built commercial buildings were flattened. Consistent EF4 to EF5 damage was noted east of S Schifferdecker Ave and continued through most of southern Joplin. Numerous homes, businesses, and medical buildings were flattened in this area, with concrete walls collapsed and crushed into the foundations. A large steel-reinforced step and floor structure leading to a completely destroyed medical building was "deflected upward several inches and cracked". Steel trusses from some of the buildings were "rolled up like paper", and deformation/twisting of the main support beams was noted. Multiple vehicles were thrown and mangled or wrapped around trees nearby. Several 300-pound concrete parking stops anchored with rebar were torn from a parking lot in this area and were thrown up to 60 yards away. Iowa State University wind engineer Parka Sarkar was able to calculate the force needed to remove the parking stops and found that winds exceeding 200 mph were needed to tear them from the parking lot.
St. John's Regional Medical Center was damaged, and demolished in 2012. The Missouri Disaster Medical Assistance Team temporarily replaced the demolished St. John's Regional Medical Center with a mobile hospital until the permanent hospital was rebuilt. The local high school, Joplin High School, was totally destroyed, as well. A total of 161 people died from tornado-related injuries as of the end of July 2011. Communications were lost and power was knocked out to many areas. An official statement from the National Weather Service has categorized the tornado as an EF5. On Sunday, May 29, President Barack Obama, Missouri Governor Jay Nixon, and Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Craig Fugate visited and toured Joplin to see what the damage looked like and attended a memorial service for the deceased. Later that day, the city held a moment of silence at 5:41 pm, to mark the time the tornado struck. The area was declared a federal disaster area.
President Barack Obama toured the community on May 29, flying into Joplin Regional Airport and speaking at a memorial at the Taylor Performing Arts Center at Missouri Southern State University about two miles (3 km) north of the worst of the devastation. Obama had been on a state visit to Europe at the time of the storm. Members of the controversial Westboro Baptist Church were also scheduled to protest the same day in Joplin, but they did not show up. There was a massive counter protest that was organized in response to the Westboro protest, in which thousands of protesters showed up holding signs saying, "God Loves Joplin" and "We Support You Joplin."
Immediately following the disaster, emergency responders were deployed within and to the city to undertake search and rescue efforts. Governor Jay Nixon declared a state of emergency for the Joplin area shortly after the tornado hit, and ordered Missouri National Guard troops to the city. By May 23, Missouri Task Force One (consisting of 85 personnel, four dogs, and heavy equipment) arrived and began searching for missing persons. Five heavy rescue teams were also sent to the city a day later. Within two days, numerous agencies arrived to assist residents in the recovery process. The National Guard deployed 191 personnel and placed 2,000 more on standby to be deployed if needed. In addition, the Missouri State Highway Patrol provided 180 troopers to assist the Joplin Police Department and other local agencies with law enforcement, rescue, and recovery efforts which also included the deployment of five ambulance strike teams, and a total of 25 ambulances in the affected area on May 24 as well as well over 75 Marines from the Ft. Leonard Wood Army Base. Within two years the city's workers and community groups compiled and published "Joplin Pays it Forward" to give recovery advice to other places hurt by disaster.