JOPLIN, Missouri. — More than 450 people are combing through the ruins of Joplin neighborhoods today, looking for victims of Sunday’s killer tornado that cut an almost one-mile-wide swath of destruction across the south side of the city.
“Rescue efforts are being effective,” Lynn Onstott, the city’s public information director, said shortly before noon. “We are finding people and helping them as we find them.”
The searchers, which included National Guardsmen, law enforcement officers, firefighters, emergency medical technicians and volunteers, were working a grid pattern in the tornado-stricken zone, Onstott said.
“We’re trying to identify what homes we’ve already been into in an efficient manner and just go from there,” she said.
The city’s confirmed death count remained at 89, she said, although a higher number is expected to be announced at a 3 p.m. news conference.
More than 1,000 people were injured by the tornado. Hundreds of injured continued to be taken to area hospitals. One of Joplin’s two hospitals, St. John’s Regional Medical Center, was knocked out of commission by the storm and its patients moved to Freeman Hospital West, to a makeshift medical center in Joplin’s Memorial Hall or to other area hospitals.
Onstott said she did not yet have a list of the other hospitals where St. John’s patients were being transferred but was able to confirm that the most critical had been moved to Freeman.
But the tornado warning system – and how it's applied by states and municipalities – may also be playing a role in affecting those attitudes. Smith calls it the "crying wolf" phenomenon. On Sunday, for example, tornado sirens went off in Lawrence, Kan., even though the area was outside the National Weather Service's tornado warning report. About three-fourths of all tornado sirens are false alarms, according to a National Weather Service study.
"It's important that we cut down the false alarm rate," Smith says. "We are inadvertently training people to not react when the sirens go off."
As happened in Joplin on Sunday, forecasters are now able to give people a 20-minute warning of a tornado strike. Researchers believe that the 20-minute mark is the "flattening-out point" for a warning's effectiveness, because longer lead times don't appear to have an appreciable impact on casualty tolls.
Still, a new generation of weather radars – being tested by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Okla. – offers the possibility of forecasting a tornado strike perhaps an hour ahead.
Such a breakthrough is already sparking debate about the possibility of ordering limited evacuations ahead of a tornado. Especially in populated areas like the places hit in Alabama and Missouri, such evacuations could probably save lives. But ordering people out of their homes to try to outrun an unpredictable tornado raises a whole array of questions about liability and safety trade-offs.
Medical personnel had to decide on the best places to send hospital patients after the tornado hit. They were in the hospital for all sorts of different conditions before the storm struck.
"We had to determine the best course of action for everyone," Scott said. "We had to get them to facilities that could handle different medical conditions."
Right now, hospital personnel are reporting to the field hospital for work, she said.
"We can redeploy them where they are needed, and we are deploying additional staff as well, including hospital-owned ambulances," said Scott.
Scott also said there are plenty of medical supplies on hand in Springfield, and the entire health system is working together to make sure all the hospitals get what they need quickly.
So far, at least 90 people are reported dead. The number of injured has not yet been reliably estimated.
No comments:
Post a Comment