Many of the comments below are covering how the story is developing over days.
Joplin, Missouri (CNN) — A tornado that chewed through a densely populated area of Joplin, Missouri killed at least 89 people as it tore apart homes and businesses, ripped into a high school and caused severe damage to one of the two hospitals in the city, officials said Monday.
As many as a quarter of the buildings in the southwest Missouri city suffered major or significant damage, fire and emergency management officials said.
Parts of the city were unrecognizable, according to Steve Polley, a storm chaser from Kansas City, Missouri, who described the damage from the Sunday night tornado as “complete devastation.”
Joplin Fire Chief Mitch Randles said he believes people were still trapped in buildings Monday morning. Authorities warned the death toll was likely to rise.
Read more on CNN: Our sympathy and prayers go out to the victims, as we reflect that all of us are in constant need of consolation for one reason or another.
Categories: Americas, Recent Headlines, United States, Weather
Professor Richard Dawkins in the last chapter of his book, the God Delusion, summarizes the four roles of religion, namely, explanation, exhortation, consolation and inspiration. In this chapter he is trying to refute the consolation and inspiration purpose of religion. This short essay linked here is meant to be a practical rebuttal of Dawkins’ views pertaining to the consolation needs of humanity. The reality of human experience and psyche is such that it cannot find any real consolation or comfort in blind science or the so called ‘survival of the fittest.’ As Carl Sagan noted, “It does not make any sense to pray to the law of gravity;” “Nor,” as Kenneth Miller adds, “does it make any sense to pray to the second law of thermodynamics, which has never given me a break, and probably never will.”
See the article titled, Longing for consolation: A Dilemma for Dawkins:
http://knol.google.com/k/zia-shah/longing-for-consolation-a-dilemma-for/1qhnnhcumbuyp/30?collectionId=1qhnnhcumbuyp.364#
Video has emerged of the terrifying twister that left at least 116 people dead and hundreds injured in Joplin, Missouri. The tornado is the deadliest single twister on record since 1955.
The tornado was six miles long and half a mile wide with winds between 135 and 165 mph when it tore through Joplin on Sunday evening, damaging at least 2,000 buildings and crushing cars. A door-to-door search for survivors is still under way, according to the Joplin Globe.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelookout/20110523/us_yblog_thelookout/terrifying-videos-of-missouri-twister-aftermath
(Reuters) – A powerful tornado scored a direct hit Joplin killing at least 116 people and leaving about 400 more injured, authorities said on Monday. The Joplin tornado is the deadliest single twister since Woodward, Oklahoma in 1947.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20110523/us_nm/us_usa_weather_history
The killer tornado ripped through the heart of Joplin, a blue-collar southwest Missouri town of 50,000 people, Sunday night, slamming straight into St. John’s Regional Medical Center. The hospital confirmed that five of the dead were patients — all of them in critical condition before the tornado hit. A hospital visitor also was killed.
The tornado destroyed possibly “thousands” of homes, Fire Chief Mitch Randles told AP. It leveled hundreds of businesses, including massive ones such as Home Depot and Wal-Mart.
It was the second major tornado disaster in less than a month. In April, a pack of twisters roared across six Southern states, killing more than 300 people, more than two-thirds of them in Alabama.
In Joplin, much of the town’s landscape was changed beyond recognition. House after house was reduced to slabs, cars were crushed like soda cans and shaken residents roamed streets in search of missing family members.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_midwest_storms
(CNN) — Severe weather rampaged across the U.S. heartland, claiming at least nine lives across Arkansas, Kansas and Oklahoma, in what has already become a historic spring storm season.
Early Wednesday, 5/25/11, the storm system was contributing to sleepless nights from Iowa to Texas, pelting many areas with golf ball-size hail.
The powerful storms paid another visit to Joplin, Missouri, where a weekend tornado killed 124 people, making it the deadliest single U.S. twister since modern record-keeping began 61 years ago.
http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/05/25/severe.weather/index.html?hpt=T1