The horror of the Joplin tornado is the subject of a new documentary film, released nearly 14 years after the twister struck Missouri with cataclysmic force, ripping into a hospital, destroying neighborhoods and killing around 160.
“You see pictures of World War II, the devastation and all that with the bombing,” Kerry Sachetta, then the Joplin High School principal, told The Associated Press on the evening of May 22, 2011, after the school was destroyed.
“That’s really what it looked like,” Sachetta said.
As he spoke that night, fires from gas leaks burned across town. The EF-5 twister, then the single deadliest in six decades, packed winds of 200 mph. At times, it was nearly a mile wide. Left in its wake was a hellscape of crushed cars and shaken residents roaming in search of missing family members. About 7,500 homes were damaged or destroyed.
“The Twister: Caught in the Storm” was released last week by Netflix following a recent spate of deadly storms that have unleashed tornadoes, blinding dust storms and wildfires.
Some of the most startling damage in Joplin was at St. John’s Regional Medical Center, where staff had only moments to hustle patients into the hallway before the 367-bed hospital was knocked off its foundation.
Flying debris blew out windows and disabled the hospital’s exposed generators, causing ventilators to stop working. The winds also scattered X-rays and medical records around 75 miles away.
Five patients and one visitor died in the immediate aftermath. Other patients later died of injuries they suffered in the storm.
On the morning after the storm, Dr. Jim Riscoe told the AP that some members of his emergency room staff showed up after the tornado with injuries of their own but worked through the night anyway.
“It’s a testimony to the human spirit,” Riscoe said, comparing the scene to a nuclear disaster. “Cars had been thrown like playing cards. Power lines were sparking. I couldn’t believe it.”
The building was so badly damaged it had to be razed the following year.
The deaths from the storm were so numerous that a makeshift morgue was set up next to a football stadium in Joplin. Hundreds of others were injured in the city of 53,000.
Among the dead was 18-year-old Will Norton, who was headed home from his high school graduation when he was sucked out of his family’s SUV through the sunroof. His father desperately held on to his legs. Norton’s body was found five days later in a nearby pond.
In the following years, his family kept his room as it was: an open pack of chewing gum, his trademark mismatched socks, his computer and the green screen that helped earn him a YouTube following for his travel chronicles.
“It’s a little comfort to go in there, go back in time and remember how it was,” his father, Mark Norton, said close to the five-year anniversary.
