They miraculously survived, but obviously were left injured and traumatized. The tornado hit right as they pulled into the parking lot. I read about two girls who had just left the graduation with their grandma, who decided to carry on with their celebration and drive to Walmart to get a cake. Some people decided to stay and go down to the lowest level of the building to take shelter, but it said that the majority of people just got in their cars and left, when a car is one of the most dangerous places you can be during a tornado. I remember reading about the high school graduation that was taking place that day, and how the sirens started going off right as everyone was leaving the event. You can lead a horse to water, but you cannot force it to drink unfortunately. They only acted upon the second sounding of the sirens, and that was well into the lifespan of the tornado. There is some potential that people would have taken it more seriously, but we can use the Little Rock tornado from Friday as an example of people not taking things as seriously as they should even in the case of a TOR E.įor this tornado, I think the biggest killer was the "Siren Mentality" and the mindset of "it has never happened before, so there is nothing to worry about." People straight up ignored the first siren because they thought it was just an average spring/summer day. (Experimental in 2012, and full implementation around 2015-2016). TOR Es were not an official product until Impact Based Warnings were implemented because of the lessons learned from this storm. CC and other products were not really a thing yet, so they had to rely on reflectivity and velocity, which goes back to point 1. Radar was not as advanced back then as it is now and the tornado was very rain wrapped. It is possible that the issuance of a TOR E would have been too little too late. If you have seen footage of it, it went from nothing to wedge in basically 15 seconds when it was already on the outskirts of town. The sounding of tornado sirens in areas not included in a tornado warning, while sirens were not sounded when the critical tornado warning was issued.” Three different tornado-warning polygons in effect for the Joplin metro area simultaneously, each providing at times different and/or conflicting information. The three times the Weather Service misstated the tornado’s direction of movement as northeast, which - if correct - would have meant the tornado would have missed Joplin. The excessively high rate of false tornado warnings issued for Jasper County, Mo., before the tragedy. It overly focused on overuse of sirens and not on:” Yet the Weather Service’s review of the event, or service assessment, overlooked the most critical issues that caused the unprecedented loss of life. The failure of the warning system that day allowed the death toll to rise to 161, the worst single tornado death toll since 1947. The tornado was rain-wrapped and invisible, so those in its path could not see the approaching storm for themselves. As I document in my book, “When the Sirens Were Silent,” a combination of errors made by the Weather Service and local emergency management wrongly led Joplinites to believe that the tornado would pass north of the city. “On May 22, 2011, the Joplin, Mo., tornado became the deadliest of the tornado-warning era.
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