support the various organizations that are busy providing food and shelter for the hundreds of people who have been displaced by the tornado. dan lothian in joplin. thank you, dan. last sunday s twister left a pile of mangled debris said to be five or six miles long, but casey anthony checked it out for himself to find out it was twice that length. reporter: show us the initial damage from the tornado. initially the little trees started through there and then it went over here, that s the trailer, the working trailer. so this is ground zero of the joplin tornado. we are going to drive its entire length from west to east to get a good picture of just how widespread the damage was. here s the first downed power lines, major electrical transmission lines. one reason much of joplin is without electrical power. so less than a mile into our journey you see the first homes that have lost part of their
getting help from volunteers offering food, sweat and comfort. brown tells me he s learned something and wants to tell the people of joplin don t turn down help and don t give up. if you can t go anywhere, you can always go home. reporter: would it have been easier for you just to pack it in and say, i m not going back and start over somewhere? yeah, it would have been a whole lot easier. it definitely would have been a whole lot easier, but i won t let this get me down. reporter: a full month after a deadly tornado and so many still so slow to turn the corner from surviving to recovery. david matingly, tuscaloosa, alabama. we are bringing you the stories beyond the destruction later this evening. a special cnn presents a twister s fury in the past of destruction. just moments from now we ll observe the moment of silence about to take place in joplin, missouri, as you are looking live at the people gathering. we ll be right back.
i just had two police officers stop by and said man, we want to shake your hand, the first glimmer of hope we ve really seen towards the town rebuilding. at some point, we re going to have to stop scratching our heads and standing staring at the rubble and roll up our sleeves and get things back to some sort of normalcy. time to roll up our sleeves and do what we can do to move on with our lives. the joplin city manager says the president s visit today will keep the national focus on his city s problems. people who live in t tuscaloosa know the challenges that come with rebuilding after such devastation. the city was hit april 27th with a tornado that killed 41 people. our david mattingly tells us recovering from such a powerful storm isn t easy. reporter: joe, it s been a month since the devastating tornado hit here in tustuscaloo.
tell us what you want to pay. we do our best to make that work. deal! my money. my choice. my meineke. we have just gotten some new information that may increase the death toll in joplin, missouri. the deputy director of missouri s department of public safety held a news conference saying there are now 146 sets of human remains. if that holds that would be up four. new bodies found, just releasing that information this afternoon. we will continue to follow that as we continue to follow the aftermath of this storm. you know, the signature of last sunday s tornado in joplin, missouri, was its size and power. earlier this week i asked cnn meteorologist chad myers how a tornado of such veracity can form. it is a volatile mixture of heat and moisture as you ll see. reporter: humidity on the ground, it starts to rise.
coming up in our one-hour special, a twister s fury at 8:00 p.m. eastern here on cnn. there are still 44 people unaccounted for after the tornado in from lynn, joplin, and jacqui jeras met a woman who didn t know if her grandmother was alive for days. jacqui helped track down the answer. they had seen an elderly woman digging through the rubble but don t know where she went. i can t locate her either. reporter: tab that friedman has been trying for days to locate her 67-year-old grandmother, ellen. here the homes are so demolished and have to be identified by spray paint on the sidewalk. that s the bathroom and they always say the safest place to be is in the bathroom. look, it is just even if she would have been in there she wouldn t have made it because it is collapsed on itself. reporter: tab that drove to joplin from oklahoma hoping to get answers after not being able