ABSTRACT
On May 22, 2011, a devastating tornado raked large portions of Joplin, Missouri in the United States (see Figure 8.1). The tornado path reached 1 mile wide in some locations, and stretched over 22 miles. One hundred and sixty-one people died and 1000 sustained injuries (National Weather Service [NWS] 2011; Kuligowski et al. 2014). As a measure of impact, the number of deaths were “almost twice the national average of 91.6 tornado fatalities per year” (Kuligowski et al. 2014, p. xiii), creating the highest number of fatalities from a single tornado in US history (Prevatt et al. 2012; Simmons and Sutter 2012).
