survivors. brian todd is live at joplin at st. john s. when we say searching for survivors, do they have any estimation of how many people could be missing in the wake of this tornado? no estimates yet, kiran. combing through this area right here. you ve got the st. john s medical center behind me. i m going to show you a little bit of the damage. our photo journalist is going to kind of hone in there as tightly as he can. the building as you can see, the facade has been ripped apart. of the part of the top of the building has been taken away. we saw doctors go in there to try to retrieve medical records and other things. we re told most of the people, if not all of the people have evacuated. we re going to go over here to give you a sense of some of the other devastation here and around the town. we got here a short time ago. a scene of utter devastation. everything seems to be wiped out. look at the cars over here. you have a van and suv on top of a pick-up truck over here. the car
many ran to seek safer ground, but boy, the devastation is coming to light today. that s right. 12 hours later life has changed in joplin, missouri. a powerful tornado ripped that city apart. the red cross said 75% of the town is virtually gone with reports of at least 30 people killed and dozens more injured. 50,000 people live in the city. no phone service, power lines are down, cars and trucks smashed and flipped. the governor calling out the national guard and declaring a state of emergency this morning. to make matters worse the city s main hospital st. john s medical center where people would have gone to get help suffered extensive damage. witnesses say windows were blown out on some of the top floors. medical records, x-rays and other items scattered nearly 70 miles away. at least 100 patients hadden to transferred to other area hospitals. crews combing through mounds of debris and rubble searching for survivors. brian todd is live at joplin at st. john s. when we