Deadly tornado tears through Missouri town

A car sits on debris after a tornado slammed into the city of Joplin in Missouri Monday. Photo: Xinhua/Reuters

Search teams, bathed in the harsh glow of floodlights, Monday picked through the rubble of entire neighborhoods and commercial districts demolished by a tornado that killed at least 89 people in the Missouri town of Joplin.

"We are recovering the dead," Joplin police Sergeant Bob Higginbotham said hours after the powerful twister struck Sunday afternoon, leaving much of the town of 50,000 in ruins and plunging the city into darkness once night fell.

Higginbotham was busy collecting the names of people reported missing. "(It's) devastating loss of life, horrible, and it goes on for miles," he said.

Newton County Coroner Mark Bridges put Joplin's death toll at 89 or more, worse than the loss of life from a twister that struck Tuscaloosa, Alabama, last month. More than 30 died in that storm.

Keith Stammer, emergency management director for Jasper county, where Joplin is located, said the full extent of the damage would not be clear until after dawn.

"Let the sun come up (and) maybe we'll know more," he said. "We have to go through every building, every house. It's going to take a long time."

Bridges said a temporary morgue had been set up at Missouri Southern State University.

Governor Jay Nixon declared a state of emergency and ordered Missouri National Guard troops deployed to help state troopers and other agencies respond to storms he said "have caused extensive damage across Missouri."

Joplin City Councilwoman Melodee Colbert-Kean, who serves as vice mayor, said Monday that the town was in a state of "chaos."

"It is just utter devastation anywhere you look to the south and the east – businesses, apartment complexes, houses, cars, trees, schools, you name it, it is leveled," she told Reuters by telephone Monday.

The storm followed an earlier burst of violent spring weather in the United States that claimed over 330 lives as tornadoes swept seven states last month. That included 238 deaths in Alabama alone on April 27 as twisters battered Tuscaloosa and other towns.

President Barack Obama issued a statement expressing his "deepest condolences" to families of the Missouri victims. He said he had directed the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to support response and recovery efforts.

One local hospital, St. John's Regional Medical Center, was slammed by the twister, with several patients were hurt as the tornado ripped through the building, said Cora Scott, a spokeswoman for a sister facility in Springfield, Missouri, just east of Joplin.

Reuters