AccuWeather's Bernie Rayno spoke with James LaDue of the National Weather Service to discuss the long-term impacts of the Joplin, Missouri, tornado 13 years ago in terms of covering severe weather.
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00:00It was 13 years ago in Joplin, Missouri, where one of the deadliest U.S. tornadoes struck.
00:06It lasted 38 minutes and tragically killed 158 people in 2011.
00:13James LeDoux is acting director of the federal government's National Windstorm Impact Reduction
00:18Program.
00:19Mr. LeDoux, thank you so much for joining us.
00:21Before we get into the questions, I'm sure when you see damage like we've seen in Greenfield
00:27and damage that we've seen so far this year, it brings back a lot of memories to what we
00:31saw in Joplin.
00:32Yeah, it sure does.
00:36This storm here has got a lot of similarities to other very strong tornadoes and nothing
00:43like Joplin.
00:44That was the deadliest tornado since the 1950s, but it was bad enough.
00:49Well, let's talk about that.
00:51Why was the Joplin tornado so destructive and what have we learned since 2011?
00:57Well, there's so many angles to that because the tornado is incredibly destructive because
01:02one thing is, is that it develops in heavy rain.
01:06So it was hidden to the people, the populace there.
01:09They had limited time to actually take cover.
01:11So the fatality rates are high, not only because of that, but also because the tornado just
01:17overwhelmed the construction that was there in the area.
01:21Most of those houses would be flattened with the winds that the Joplin tornado provided.
01:27And when that happens, then the fatality rate starts going up.
01:32Typically a flattened house means that you could have potentially, most likely serious
01:38injuries.
01:40With what we've seen in past studies, something like on the order of greater than 1% of all
01:46households that are occupied would have fatalities.
01:49That's as high as it gets that we've seen in tornadoes.
01:52And certainly we've seen similar before that, but given the width of that tornado and that
01:59it maxed out right over the town, that was just everything putting together to create
02:06a mass disaster situation, a mass casualty situation.
02:10Just last week, buildings in downtown Houston were hit with straight line winds of 100 miles
02:14per hour.
02:15How rare is that and can many buildings withstand that force?
02:20Yeah, so as we saw that in Houston with the, what we call it the ratio now, is that we
02:27get 100 mile per hour plus winds, the glazing on high rise buildings often suffers from
02:33flying debris.
02:34And I think we saw that there's a lot of windows that were blown out.
02:39Sometimes flying debris comes from the streets.
02:41Sometimes it comes from gravel rooftops.
02:45So we start seeing that.
02:46And the last time we saw such destruction there in Houston in downtown was from Hurricane
02:51Allen in 1983.
02:53I believe that was 1983.
02:56So that does happen, but it's kind of rare.
03:00Most places, well, let's say even in the worst areas that are climatologically impacted
03:06by the ratios, that's from let's say Iowa to Ohio throughout the Midwest, they may see
03:13maybe two durations a year.
03:15Down in Houston, much more rare, maybe one every four to five years at most.
03:21And I don't think they've seen one like this in quite some time, in fact, back since the
03:2680s.
03:28With sensors and new technology, are we getting better at knowing and maybe anticipating these
03:34wind speeds?
03:35Yeah, so we're getting better, especially with the radar network, detecting winds as
03:41they are occurring.
03:45What we call the Weather Service Radar, the WSR-88D network that the National Weather
03:49Service runs along with the Defense Department and FAA, they have added new technologies
03:55to that, especially much higher resolution and much more frequent updating.
04:01Maybe down to like one minute when we do the super rapid scans in the radar.
04:07So we can detect them.
04:08For durations, though, the forecasting is still a challenge.
04:12It's getting better, but we tend to miss some.
04:16So for example, I don't think we're expecting a duration of that morning that Houston got
04:21hit.
04:22We were expecting severe thunderstorms.
04:23I think there was at least an enhanced risk of severe thunderstorms, but not to that level.
04:29Yeah.
04:30All right, James Ledoux, acting director of the federal government's National Windstorm
04:35Impact Reduction Program.
04:38Thank you for joining us here today, sir.