One week after the storm, the National Weather Service estimated that 6,954 homes had been completely destroyed, while 359 homes suffered major damage. Later, there would be reports that the entire hospital had been moved four inches off its foundation. Because there were concerns that the structure might collapse, once the tornado passed, the building was evacuated. Doctors and nurses had only minutes to pull patients from their rooms and into hallways before the storm struck, and six people died. Every window in the building was blown out, and the top two floors were ripped from the structure. The hospital took a direct hit from the tornado. That night, there were 183 patients at St. In parking lots, concrete barriers designed to stop cars, each of them weighing 200-300 pounds and re-barred into asphalt, had been plucked into the air and tossed as far as 60 yards. A team from the National Weather Service found vehicles that had been rolled into balls of bent metal and broken glass by the force of the storm. More than 15,000 vehicles, including heavy buses and tractor trailers, were picked up and carried by the winds-some for hundreds of yards. As the storm moved through Joplin, it gained strength. At its widest point, the path of the tornado stretched a full mile. It first touched down in the southern part of the city, near the intersection of JJ Highway and West 32 Street, and tracked eastward, causing damage for 13 miles. It began at 5:41 PM local time and lasted for 32 minutes. The tornado that hit Joplin, Missouri on was an EF5. At the other end of the scale, an EF5 tornado has the strength to tear buildings from their foundations and carry the debris through the air. At the bottom end of the scale, an EF0 tornado might bring down tree limbs. After a storm, meteorologists, weather researchers, and civil engineers will examine the field of damage and make a determination about where a particular tornado falls along a metric called the Enhanced Fujita Scale. Fugate of FEMA said that the process was sped up over all, but that “there were some hiccups in there.Tornadoes are measured by the strength of the wind they produce. Counties that decided not to use the corps for debris removal still received federal money. The corps has removed about 4.8 million cubic yards of debris in Alabama. Coghlan of the corps said it had provided a “historic statewide average” for debris removal of $46 per cubic yard. “If I’m going to bid a contract, I want to know what I’m bidding,” he said. Yarbrough also said the corps could not provide precise cost estimates for federally run debris removal, which made it harder to determine whether the county should simply hire private contractors to do the work. But he complained that government red tape had made the cleanup slower and harder than it needed to be. “I think their intentions were good,” said Stanley Yarbrough, a county commissioner in Cullman, Ala. Some have criticized the federal response. “It was just debris.” But tracking down property owners, many far flung, and working up the legal papers to allow right of entry, is slow work as well. “You couldn’t even identify yards” in many areas, Mr. said that its efforts to divert toxic materials from the stream of debris included more than 1,200 cylinders of propane and compressed gas 3,624 “white goods,” like refrigerators, freezers, air-conditioners, washers and dryers about 71,000 containers of hazardous materials, from paint cans to 55-gallon drums and larger 474 batteries and 24,516 “electronic waste” items, like junked electrical equipment. In Joplin alone, as of July 31, the E.P.A. The Environmental Protection Agency works to ensure that hazardous substances are kept out of landfills. All the while, workers check for substances like asbestos. Damaged structures must be demolished cars, trucks, boats and refrigerators must be carted away, along with rotting food and hazardous materials. Now environmental and health concerns about such pyres mean that much of the mess is sent to landfills, with efforts to separate out the worst of it and recycle when possible.ĭebris removal is not “a simple matter of having contractors load and haul truckloads of branches to a landfill,” said Lisa Coghlan, a spokeswoman for the corps in Alabama. In other times, disposing of debris meant piling it up and burning it.
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