miles per hour. they ll be out tomorrow looking at the real damage, not just aerials. did you say the debris around this thing was as wide as 2 1/2 miles at one point? that s right. when the suction picks stuff up off the ground, it throws it into the tornado itself, into the funnel, into the c condensation funnel and everything gets thrown out. if the radar sees all of that debris and thinks it s rain, thinks it s something, it s bouncing off of that debris. and that debris bounce-off field is 2 1/2 miles in diameter. you can see how much larger the debris field is when it turned into itself. 2 1/2 miles across. everything you see there is a man-made something. a shingle. a window. a door. houses were blown apart, obviously. even some of these pick-up trucks were blown tens of 20 feet in the air and thrown back down on their top. this is a devastatingly large
we re following the breaking news this hour, a tornado outbreak that scraped parts of the midwest this morning, killing at least nine people and injuring more than 100. hardest hit, harrisburg, illinois, where at least six people died, including two children. within the last half hour, we learned the tornado was a category ef-4, with winds, get this, up to 170 miles an hour, and as wide as two football fields. in the last hour, the mayor spoke at a grief-stricken news conference. we have suffered the loss of lives. we ve suffered many injures, and millions of dollars worth of is it damage, but first and foremost the loss of lives breaks my heart today. in neighboring missouri, the governor puts the damage in the tens of millions. there s also damage in kansas and kentucky, where the national guard has been called out. let s get the latest, chad myers is watching what s going on. the heartbreaking to see it, not a whole lot of warning. what s going on now? i think the mo
went down yesterday. this radar is remarkable how it blew up. we ll run through this real quick. the tornado itself, the radar, just really ripped through joplin after exploding across southeast kansas. this wasn t a long-lived event where it went 200, 300 mile super cells like the last ones that rolled through alabama. it was enough to have all the ingredients to explode and notice it moved to the south and effort. 48 reports of tornadoes yesterday. 20 on saturday. also a deadly tornado in kansas saturday. of course our friends in minneapolis we re thinking of you, several injured with one fatality from a tornado yesterday. one of the 48 here. here s where the action is today. this is not severe at the moment but rolling through parts of the ohio and tennessee river valleys. later on today we expect to see a threat for some severe weather if you are doing travel, there will be be spots in new york where you have to deal with drizzle, but the highlight of the area there is where we e
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
i ve seen multiple vorticeities before, but i ve never seen so many. why do you think this storm was so unique? everything was there yesterday. there was just it was just the models were showing a ton of cape, and i m sure you ve talked about that on the air before, but when you get that much instability out there and you get as much sheer as there was on a day like that, you knew there were going to be tornados and it was just crazy. like i said, i ve never i ve never honestly seen this many right in that area just dancing around each other. it was just it was incredible. how long did it last? that multiple vortex tornado probably lasted, you know, time flies, but probably three or four minutes and then it kind of got wrapped in the rain so it wasn t as easy to depict what was going on, but the rfd and the inflow of winds understand actually the tornado itself, but the winds feeding into that tornado were probably 80 or 90