The tornado tore a path roughly a mile (1.6 kilometers) wide and six miles (9.6 kilometers) long, destroying a hospital, flattening a school, and slamming cars into buildings, the Associated Press reported. People walk a devastated street in Joplin, Missouri (map), on Sunday, hours after a tornado killed at least 116 people, as of Monday afternoon, and left the town in ruins. That's really what it looked like," Joplin resident and high school principal Kerry Sachetta told the AP.The especially violent twister may have been an F5 tornado on the Fujita scale, which ranks tornadoes based on wind speed and damage potential, according to Jeff Masters, meteorological director for the Weather Underground website.An F4 tornado packs winds from 207 to 260 miles (333 to 418 kilometers) an hour, while an F5 storm's gusts rage from 261 to 318 miles (420 to 511 kilometers) an hour.ON TV: Witness: Tornado Swarm 2011 airs Sunday, May 29, 9 p.m. And changes were made to the way thunderstorm and tornado warnings are issued.People walk a devastated street in Joplin, Missouri (map), on Sunday, hours after a tornado killed at least 116 people, as of Monday afternoon, and left the town in ruins.The tornado tore a path roughly a mile (1.6 kilometers) wide and six miles (9.6 kilometers) long, destroying a hospital, flattening a school, and slamming cars into buildings, the Associated Press reported."You see pictures of World War II, the devastation and all that with the bombing. Upgrades of satellite and radar technology paint a clearer picture for forecasters. In the wake of the disaster, lessons were learned. It traveled 21 miles and destroyed more than 7,000 buildings. The tornado kept heading east-southeast, crossing Interstate 44, where it flung cars and road signs, and finally lifting at 6:12pm northeast of Granby, Missouri. So, the residence time of that spinning, violent tornado going through the hospital area, the residential area, and eventually the commercial area, the east side of Joplin, it’s easy to see why we had fatalities,” explains Runnels. Keep in mind that this was about three-quarters of a mile wide. “Moving anywhere from twenty to thirty-five miles per hour. Sections of Joplin High School were destroyed and stores in the main business district were leveled. Touching down around 5:30 pm on the western edge of the city, the tornado chewed up homes and businesses as it moved east. Winds in excess of 200 mph resulted in catastrophic damage, killing 158 and injuring more than 1,000. That’s when we became very, very concerned,” says Steve Runnels, the Warning Coordination Meteorologist for NWS Springfield. That’s when we knew that an extremely unusual event was going through a very populated area. “Once we saw an indication that debris has been lofted ten, fifteen thousand feet up into the air. The National Weather Service office in Springfield, Missouri, had been tracking the severe weather threat all day. On May 22, 2011, one of the deadliest tornadoes on record struck the southwest Missouri town of Joplin. Sadly, the same cannot be said when a massive EF-5 tornado struck Joplin, MO, one month later. Louis metro on April 22, 2011, amazingly no one was killed. – When a powerful EF-4 tornado struck the St. Please look at the time stamp on the story to see when it was last updated. This is an archived article and the information in the article may be outdated.
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