Crews race to find tornado survivors ahead of storms

EMERGENCY crews drilled through concrete at a ruined Home Depot, making peepholes in the rubble in hopes of finding lost shoppers and employees.

A dog clambered through the shattered remains of a house, sniffing for any sign of the woman and infant who lived there.

Across devastated Joplin, searchers move from one enormous debris pile to another, racing to respond to any report of a possible survivor.

The toll yesterday was at least 116 dead, with perhaps as many as 17 rescued. Reports suggest a further 1,500 people remain missing.

Searchers fought the clock because anybody still alive after the deadliest single tornado in 60 years was losing precious strength two days after the disaster. And another round of storms was closing in.

For Milissa Burns, hope was fading that her 16-month-old grandson, whose parents were both hospitalised after the tornado hit their home, would be found.

Yesterday, she showed up at a demolished dental office near the child’s home to watch a search team. At one point, a dog identified possible human remains, prompting eight searchers to dig frantically but came away with nothing. Burns was weary but composed. Her daughter — the boy’s aunt — sobbed next to her.

“We’ve already checked out the morgue,” Burns said. “I’ve called 911 a million times. I’ve done everything I can do. He was so light and little. He could be anywhere.”

The National Weather Service said yesterday that the twister that crippled Joplin appeared to be a rare “multivortex” tornado, with two or more small and intense centres of rotation orbiting the larger funnel.

Another top job was testing the city’s tornado sirens to make sure they were operable ahead of another round of potentially violent weather due to start yesterday evening and expected to last into today in some places. Emergency officials warned jittery residents well in advance of the test.

David Imy, a meteorologist at the federal government’s Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma, said conditions were ripe for severe thunderstorms, including tornadoes, in parts of Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas, Texas, Kentucky and Tennessee, as well as nearly all of Oklahoma.

Throughout the search efforts, new reports emerged of clusters of victims: 11 people dead in a nursing home, three bodies found in an Elks Lodge.

The tornado tossed three vehicles into the Greenbriar nursing home and left nothing more than a 10-foot interior wall standing.

Jasper County Emergency Director Keith Stammer said the scope of the destruction was making it difficult to account for people affected the storm. He suggested that many survivors, with nowhere to go, left Joplin for Kansas, Arkansas, Oklahoma or other parts of Missouri.

People in the Joplin area and beyond have turned to online social networks to find family members missing since the tornado or to learn about the plight of survivors.

Multiple Facebook pages created since the tornado are filled with requests for information about specific people who have not been heard from since Sunday. Some pages include photos of the missing. Other posts share the news about Joplin residents who are alive.