Joplin tornado

The Joplin tornado, also referred to as simply the Joplin EF5, was a large, deadly and devastating EF5 tornado that struck the city of Joplin, Missouri, United States during the evening hours of Sunday, May 22, 2011, causing catastrophic damage to it and the surrounding regions. As part of a larger late-May sequence of tornadic activity, the extremely violent tornado began just west of Joplin at about 5:34 p.m. CDT (UTC–05:00) and quickly reached a peak width of nearly 1 mile (1.6 km) as it tracked through the southern part of the city, before later impacting rural Jasper and Newton counties and dissipating after 38 minutes on the ground at 6:12 p.m. CDT (UTC–05:00). The tornado was on the ground for a total of 21.62 miles (34.79 km).

The tornado devastated a large portion of the city of Joplin, damaging nearly 8,000 buildings, and of those, destroying over 4,000 houses. The damage—which included major facilities like one of Joplin's two hospitals as well as much of its basic infrastructure—amounted to a total of $2.9 billion (equivalent to about $4 billion today), making the Joplin tornado the costliest single tornado in U.S. history. The insurance payout was the highest in Missouri history, breaking the previous record of $2 billion from the hailstorm of April 10, 2001. The tornado was the fifth out of six total EF5s that occurred in 2011, with four having occurred a month earlier during the 2011 Super Outbreak, and only two days before the same outbreak sequence produced another EF5 in El Reno, Oklahoma on May 24.

Overall, the tornado killed 158 people (including eight indirect deaths) and injured some 1,150 others, making it the deadliest tornado of 2011. It ranks as the deadliest tornado in Missouri in addition to being one of the deadliest in the United States, having the highest death toll since the Glazier–Woodward F5 tornado in Texas and Oklahoma in 1947 and the seventh-deadliest overall in the U.S. It was the first F5/EF5 tornado to occur in Missouri since May 20, 1957, when an F5 tornado destroyed several suburbs of Kansas City, and only the second F5/EF5 tornado in Missouri since 1950. It was the third tornado to strike Joplin since May 1971.

In the aftermath, President Barack Obama toured the city on May 29, speaking at a memorial service for the victims. He would also deliver the commencement address at Joplin High School a year later in 2012. Services were setup to help rebuild, with most of the town having businesses reopen as well as new ones being built by 2018. Additionally, the tornado helped inspire FEMA to create the Waffle House Index for disaster preparations as a result of some locations remaining open during the storm.