Joplin’s EF-5 tornado killed 158 people, the deadliest since modern record keeping began in 1950

The tornado that struck Joplin, Missouri, on Sunday, May 22, 2011, killed 158 people and was rated EF-5, with winds greater than 200 mph. The National Weather Service describes it as the deadliest tornado in the United States since modern record keeping began in 1950, and more than 1,000 people were injured on an afternoon that began hot and humid.

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The storm remains a benchmark for what a single violent tornado can do to a modern city that had sirens, a hospital and a tornado warning in place.

The National Weather Service Record

In its summary of the event, the National Weather Service reports that a supercell tracked from extreme southeast Kansas into far southwest Missouri and produced an EF-5 tornado over Joplin, with 158 fatalities in the Joplin area and more than 1,000 injured. The same storm and others produced additional tornadoes, wind damage and flash flooding across far southwest Missouri. The agency’s release also refers to NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco and National Weather Service Director Jack Hayes discussing how new technology could lengthen warning lead times, and includes the line “Tragedies like this fuel the resolve to build a Weather-Ready Nation.” The record is a statement about deaths from one tornado since 1950, the year the modern tally begins, not a claim about every storm in the nation’s history, and the NWS also notes that 2011 was the fourth deadliest tornado year in U.S. history.

Where Joplin Sits Among the Deadliest Tornadoes

The Storm Prediction Center keeps a list of the 25 deadliest U.S. tornadoes, and Joplin ranks seventh on it at 158 deaths, behind the 1925 Tri-State tornado at 695, the 1840 Natchez tornado at 317, the 1896 St. Louis tornado at 255, the two April 1936 tornadoes at Tupelo, Mississippi, and Gainesville, Georgia, with 216 and 203 deaths, and the 1947 Woodward, Oklahoma, tornado at 181. The page cautions that death counts from the 1800s and early 1900s are estimates because records from that era were inconsistent. That caution explains why the 1950 cutoff exists. Joplin is the deadliest tornado of the modern era, a period with systematic damage surveys and consistent death tallies, yet six earlier tornadoes on the list killed more people. Joplin is the only one of the seven deadliest to have happened in the twenty-first century.

University of Nebraska-Lincoln weather researchers who maintain their own summary of the deadliest tornadoes describe Joplin as a one-mile-wide tornado, the third to strike the city since 1971, with damage totaling almost $3 billion, and note that over half of the people who died were inside their homes.

The Warning Timeline and Rating Debate

Warning time is a central part of the story. A timeline compiled by KSHB from National Weather Service records says the Springfield office issued a tornado warning at 5:17 p.m., about 17 minutes before the tornado touched down at roughly 5:34 p.m., and that a tornado watch had been in effect for more than four hours. Sirens had sounded at 5:11 p.m. Even with that lead time, the tornado entered a densely built part of Joplin.

The details of the storm’s size and rating are described somewhat differently across references. A detailed encyclopedia entry on the tornado says the National Weather Service first rated it a high-end EF4, and that later surveys upgraded it to EF-5 with estimated peak winds of 225 to 250 mph. It also records that a 2013 engineering study disputed the EF-5 rating, finding no damage consistent with winds above 200 mph, while NWS Springfield maintained the rating because a small area of EF-5 damage was found near St. John’s Regional Medical Center.

The death toll also appears with small variations across sources. KSHB’s timeline cites an estimated 161 deaths, and the encyclopedia entry says the city count was 161 with 158 direct deaths, while the NWS figure of 158 is the federal agency’s count and the one used here.

Damage Figures and Lasting Preparedness

Damage figures show why Joplin still frames how emergency managers talk about risk. The entry says the National Institute of Standards and Technology counted 7,964 damaged buildings, at least 3,734 of them destroyed, and that total damage reached about $2.8 billion, making it the costliest single tornado in U.S. history. St. John’s Regional Medical Center lost nearly all its windows on three sides and was later torn down and rebuilt as Mercy Hospital, which reopened in 2015.

As of October 2026, the Joplin numbers are fixed in the federal record: 158 deaths, an EF-5 rating, and a place as the deadliest tornado since 1950. The lessons attached to them are practical ones, from taking sirens seriously to building with stronger connections between houses and foundations, which Joplin began requiring after the storm.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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