Bethany Hale, with the National Weather Service, chats Tuesday with Joplin tornado survivor Hugh Hills about his experience with the EF-5 twister. (Photo by T. Rob Brown/The Joplin, Mo., Globe)

CNHI News Service

JOPLIN, Mo. — Dick Wagenmaker, a National Weather Service meteorologist from Detroit, has seen his share of storm damage.

“My first impression: I have never seen anything like this,” he said. “It was humbling.”

Wagenmaker is the lead meteorologist in charge of a four-member team that will be asking a lot of questions in search of answers over the next few days. It is possible that the findings from Joplin could be tied to a similar survey that was conducted in Tuscaloosa, Ala., after a powerful tornado struck there in April.

The team is composed of meteorologists Bethany Hale, of Kansas City; Justin Weaver, of Lubbock, Texas; and Gary Garnet, of Cleveland, Ohio; and Jen Spinney, a cultural anthropologist with the University of Oklahoma.

Members of the team struck out Tuesday with one objective: assess how the threat of the May 22 tornado was communicated to residents and how they responded.

The goal, Wagenmaker said, “is to save lives” in the event another EF-5 tornado strikes a densely populated urban area.

“We are in data-collection mode right now,” said Wagenmaker. “We want to talk to as many people as we can. We want to hear their stories.”

Hale said: “We want to know what they did when they heard the sirens. What type of media did they get their warning from? Was it TV, radio, weather radio or sirens?

The end process will tell the researchers about the effectiveness of issuing warnings, how people received that information and what they did here when they received that threat.

Wagenmaker said several of the people with whom he spoke Tuesday said they heard Joplin’s storm sirens before the tornado struck, “but they wanted some kind of confirmation.”

“They turned on the TV or looked outside,” he said. “When they confirmed the threat, they took cover in a variety of ways.”

Wagenmaker said that finding, though not official at this point, suggests that many residents of Joplin knew they needed to put as many walls between themselves and the tornado as they could.

Hale said the residents indicated to her “that this storm was different, that people took action above and beyond what they would normally take. This storm required action.”

---
Details for this story were provided by The Joplin (Mo.) Globe.