Mother Nature at it again

Joplin, Mo., took a direct hit from at least one mile-wide tornado this afternoon and the storm is grinding its way across the Midwest right now. At least 24 dead in Joplin.

Pictures:
Local hospital


Local Walmart

 

I was half-watching at the time, but I think a Weather Channel reporter was so shaken by the magnitude of it that he got choked up for a moment and they cut away or cut short his interview. And I point that out not as a criticism of him.

 

Mike Bettes just choked up again interviewing some guys who had been transporting injured people to local hospitals. There have already been some horrifying stories of people getting swept out the windows of the hospital that got hit. I think we're going to hear more stories like that in the next couple of days.

 

Listening to the Jasper County police scanner channel on some Android app. It's pure chaos.

Just heard..."Set up flashers by the bodies so the coroner can find them."

 

Jesus...

 

Was listening to the same scanner feed ... they are detailing police officers to drive to nearby medical schools because they've run out of body bags.

 

This isn't small-town Greensburg, which was awful enough.

Joplin is a town of 50,000 people. If it's 75 percent flattened like the Red Cross estimates, it is devastating.

A few of my old college buddies live there. I haven't talked to them a while, but they're on my mind tonight.

 

I've experienced a tornado and a 7.0 earthquake.

The tornado was 10,000 times scarier. And it wasn't 1/10th the size of this Joplin one.

 

I have a lot of cousins in and around Joplin. I'm out of touch with most of them, but I'm sure I'll get some sort of word through my mother in the next day or two. I can't follow this kind of story. The tragedy swallows me whole. I'm already physically and emotionally numb thinking about the children.

 

I grew up in the Ozarks, and can't remember a single storm as deadly. Absolutely horrible.

 

I drive through Greensburg every year. Still has a few streets in the northwest part of town with nothing, but that city has done a helluva job rebuilding. Multiply by 25, and you have a city the size of Joplin. If 75 percent of that city is wiped out ...

And I just looked at the radar ... holy fuck ... a red band about 150 miles long is ready to hit Joplin and SW Missouri.

 

Red on radar is bad, but it's the white and purple inside the red that'll fuck you up.

One of those kinds of storms has fired up just in the last hour and is getting ready to go right across Fort Worth.