How Many People Were Killed In the Joplin Tornado? The Real Number is Staggering
Almost 14 years after the F5 tornado that devastated Joplin, Missouri, a documentary on Netflix sheds light on the impact the natural event had on the town and its residents. The Twister: Caught in the Storm recounts the hours and minutes leading up to the development of the storm on May 22, 2011, from the point of view of different people, including students graduating from Joplin High School and amateur storm chasers.
The devastation brought by the tornado was catastrophic. 6,954 homes were completely destroyed, while 359 sustained major damage. St. John’s Regional Medical Center was also hit hard, and Joplin High School was leveled. Several churches, elementary schools, a high school, two fire stations, a Walmart, a Home Depot, grocery stores, and more had to be rebuilt.
But the most tragic loss was the loss of life, and that’s what The Twister: Caught in the Storm focuses on. How many people died in the Joplin tornado? Here’s the answer.
How many people died in the Joplin tornado?
A total of 161 people lost their lives in Joplin from the catastrophic tornado, with 158 of those considered to be direct deaths. The official reports also list nearly 1,000 injured. The Twister: Caught in the Storm focuses on the stories of some of the people who survived that day, as well as the reporters who were working to keep the public informed about the devastation of the tornado, only the second EF-5 to hit Missouri since 1950.
The documentary, directed by Alexandra Lacey (The Tinder Swindler), centers on a group of Joplin High School seniors in the class of 2011. The tornado hit on high school graduation day, and the school happened to also be destroyed by the storm. The documentary shows videos from that day, filmed through cell phones or captured via surveillance footage, not just of the school but from around town. “I looked up, and I saw clear blue sky. We were in the eye, totally surrounded by chaos,” one survivor, Kaylee, says at one point in the documentary.
Another survivor, then 16-year-old Steven Weersing, is heavily featured in the Netflix documentary. “I was just flying,” he says in the documentary about the moment when he was caught by the storm. “I thought my life was over.” But he didn’t die. However, afterward, Weersing contracted a rare, flesh-eating fungus that almost did kill him, and caused doctors to have to amputate parts of multiple organs. He wasn’t the only one; many surviving victims of the tornado also contracted the same fungus, with at least three dying from the rare disease.
It’s perhaps a strange footnote in what is already a surprising story, filled with a lot of devastating twists and turns. The Joplin tornado ranks as the seventh-deadliest tornado in U.S. history and the 27th-deadliest worldwide. A lot of people lost their lives, many of them without any sort of warning.
