Joplin’s Home Depot began selling lumber, roofing material, and whatever it could get, out of its parking lot, soon after the tornado, supplying much-needed building materials for repairing and rebuilding Joplin (Lowes, less than half a mile down the street, but barely damaged, was open the day after the storm). Such was the case at the Walmart across the street. With block construction, which is more common, when walls fail they break apart, rather than fall as a continuous slab, causing less collapse and damage. Hundreds of Home Depot stores like this one, as well as those of other retailers and warehouses, are built this way. The tilt up method of construction, where walls are slabs of concrete, poured flat on site, tilted up vertically, then secured primarily by connecting them to the lightweight metal roof is a common and cost-effective method for making big box buildings. An F5 tornado like this one has winds around 225 mph. The 28 survivors in the back were lucky that the wall next to them fell outwards, away from them, though some were saved from collapsing walls only by the happenstance of a sturdy desk.īuilding codes in most of the tornado prone parts of the country require commercial structures to withstand up to 90 mph winds. The wind ripped the roof of the Home Depot off, and the unsupported tilt-up concrete walls toppled over like dominos. He let them in, but none of them made it to the safety of the back of the store. Through the glass doors, an employee saw several people trying to get in from the parking lot. When the tornado appeared, employees directed everyone to the break area room at the back of the store, and locked the doors so they would not blow open. Across 20th Street, at the Home Depot, 29 customers and employees were amidst the canyon-like aisles of the warehouse retail store. Then it crossed the main commercial strip, Range Line Road, a mile north of Exit 8 of the interstate, with Golden Corral Buffet, KFC, Taco Hut, Red Wing Shoes, and Walmart Supercenter number 59, then through a industrial/warehouse area, the eastern residential outskirts, then crossed Interstate 44, and disappeared back up into the sky.Ģ03 people were in the Walmart when the tornado hit the cinderblock big box. It landed first in the rural outskirts, then through the increasing density of developed housing blocks, crossing South Main Street a mile south of downtown. The tornado went from west to east, carving a cross section through this community of 50,000.
And a lot of people were out shopping with their families.
More than half of the deaths were people at home. Joplin was de-homed by a despotic storm this summer. This was the worst tornado strike in the USA since 1947, and the most expensive so far (17,000 insurance claims and $3 billion in damages). 7,000 homes were destroyed, 18,000 cars were flung around, 500 commercial buildings were demolished. Everything in this routed out swath was ripped up and blown away. ON MAY 22, 2011, A F-5 tornado hit Joplin, Missouri, gouging a half mile wide, 7 mile long belt of utter destruction through town.
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