Disaster Transplant

Case Study of the
Worst-Case Scenario

Barrett Dorner
Bowling Green State University
2018

Abstract

This paper aims to take a real-world “worst-case scenario,” take its impact, and overlay it in an entirely new location. In this instance, the 2011 Joplin, Missouri tornado — rated EF-5, the highest possible rating in the Enhanced Fujita tornado damage assessment scale — will be overlaid onto Wood County, Ohio. The lessons learned from Joplin are used to determine recommendations for mitigation and preparation in Wood County.

INTRODUCTION

“What if” scenarios are the bread and butter of emergency preparedness. Transplanting an extraordinarily destructive tornado and applying its deaths, injuries, damage, and breadth to an area within Wood County, Ohio, the author’s response area, provides a unique opportunity to go beyond imagination and generic possibilities and instead apply a well-documented worst-case scenario to another location that could very well experience the same.

Special attention will be placed on the successes and failures in public education, emergency communications, and factors that led to the deaths, injuries, and damage in Joplin. Doing this will allow development of recommendations to drive Wood County’s tornado mitigation and preparedness as part of a general all-hazards approach.

Joplin, Missouri

SUMMARY OF EVENTS

On May 21, 2011, a tornado ravaged Joplin, Missouri. The monster cyclone became the most deadly on record, with winds reaching over 220 miles per hour over a path 22 miles long and — at times — a mile wide (6th, 2011). About six miles of that track was a direct hit on the city, leaving 153 dead in its wake, and untold damage to homes, businesses, and severe damage to a hospital (2011). Of the hospital damage, National Weather Service damage assessors noted:

“The St. Johns Hospital structure had just about every window blown out on three sides. Once the wind was inside the building, it caused severe destruction of interior walls and ceilings on every floor. A portion of the top roof was removed or heavily damaged. It was reported by structural engineers that a portion of the hospital’s foundation and underpinning system were compromised. The engineers determined the entire structure was not safe and would have to be demolished and replaced with a new structure.” (2011)

Learning what made Joplin so deadly — even with a tornado warning issued 19 minutes ahead of time — can provide an opportunity for other communities to learn their own weaknesses and develop plans to mitigate them. Additionally, lessons learned can be applied to the preparedness phase, both for emergency managers, emergency responders, community leaders, all the way down to each individual citizen.

Lessons Learned from Joplin

The most comprehensive document on Joplin and potential improvements is a technical investigation conducted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) that was published in 2013. The investigation covers emergency communications, tornado history in the area, fatalities, injuries, and public response.

Tornado history. Until the EF-5 of 2011, only one other EF-2 or higher tornado had struck Joplin since tornado record keeping began in 1950 (2013). That said, 182 tornadoes rated EF-2 or higher struck within 80 miles of the city in the same time period. The fact that the city had only been struck once possibly fueled another problem: rumors, so-called “old wives’ tales,” and other such baseless information.

In Joplin, investigators discovered that the public generally held the belief that “tornado movements and regional topography” made the city of Joplin “immune” to a direct tornado strike (2013). The same — almost word-for-word — tales have persisted in and around Wood County, Ohio, since the author’s childhood in the area. This will be further addressed in the recommendations.

Emergency communications. Another battle of public perception is the effect of false alarm tornado warnings. Investigators found the National Weather Service’s false alarm rate in Joplin was “high,” (2013). This may have led to a normalization of deviance, in that people were used to hearing of tornado warnings and used to take cover. But, after reaching a certain familiarity with the tornado warnings and having no experiences of actual tornadoes to cause concern to persist, citizens may have become complacent. The potential that individuals did not take action to protect themselves is further addressed in the fatalities, injuries, and public response section below.

However, interviewees also said there was a high false-alarm rate for Joplin’s outdoor warning sirens, despite being activated only once a year on average (2013). The important takeaway here: even if false alarms are decreased, public perception may not always match reality. People may still disregard warnings.

A failure noted by the NIST team focused on the Joplin-Jasper County Reverse 9-1-1 system. The system is designed to call citizens via telephone to warn them of immediate danger. The system was not utilized on May 22, 2011, “due to its inability to disseminate information in a timely manner,” (2013).

Fatalities, injuries, and public response. For emergency managers, this portion of the report may be the most important in developing plans to assist individuals and families in their own emergency preparedness. Per the research, 87% of fatalities involved people who were inside buildings — 59% in residential, 41% in non-residential (2013). 12 patients at St. Johns Hospital died. With those numbers in mind, NIST found that:

“No fatalities occurred in demolished, detached homes in which people took refuge in basements. Additional, NIST found no evidence that any of those killed were located underground during the tornado.” (2013).

Zero percent of fatalities occurred in basements — the primary source of shelter as described in decades of tornado education information. So why did some not take shelter, even if it was available to them? Overall, two factors were Identified that limited the public from seeking appropriate shelter: lack of awareness, and an inability to perceive personal risk (2013). In fact, investigators wrote that the primary factor interviewees cited as a reason to take shelter were so-called “high-intensity cues,” like seeing the tornado or watching others rushing to shelter (2013).

Another interesting statistic to note: NIST found that a “disproportionate” number of elderly residents (age 60 and older) were killed or injured in the tornado (2013) at a rate of 8 fatalities per 1,000 people; for citizens under 60, that rate was 2:1,000.

Transplanting
the Disaster:
Wood County, Ohio

Overlay Explained

In Figure 1, the map of Joplin served as the starting point. Developed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the map shows the extent of the structural damage caused by the tornado — red being the most extreme, almost complete destruction, and green representing lesser but still significant damage (Joplin, 2011). From there, using image manipulation software, the same path of destruction was cut from Joplin and pasted over a map of northern Wood County. The damage covers, almost entirely, the cites of Rossford and Northwood.

FIGURE 1

comparisons

Taking the image concept a step further, it is important to consider differences in each community that contribute to outcomes such as fatalities or injuries. In Table 1, a comparison is drawn between the Joplin tornado, the hypothetical Wood County tornado depicted in Figure 1, and the real statistics from an EF-4 tornado that struck Lake Township, Ohio, in 2010 (June, 2015).

TABLE 1

Possible Similarities

The Joplin tornado path transposed onto Wood County would put several nursing homes and one hospital, ProMedica Bay Park, in the worst of the damage. If these buildings are not designed to handle 200 mile-per-hour and higher winds, even for incredibly short amounts of time, the lives of those unable to care for themselves are at extreme risk. This, as mentioned earlier, factored into the data gathered by NIST investigators that adults 60 years of age and older died at a rate four times higher than the rest of the population during Joplin’s tornado.

Fire departments, police departments, roadways, electrical systems, and other critical infrastructure could be decimated by the winds from an EF-5 tornado. During the EF-4 that struck Lake Township, a regional dispatch center, police department, and multiple emergency vehicles were all destroyed — hampering efforts to assist others.

Major Differences

Perhaps the most telling statistic that explains why Joplin suffered so much loss of life and property is the “Population Density” category. Wood County’s population — in both the hypothetical and in Lake Township — is far more spread out than Joplin. With cornfields and large industrial areas, a tornado with the same path, size, and intensity as Joplin would place far fewer citizens in harm’s way.

Another major factor is the placement of critical infrastructure. In Joplin’s case, the tornado directly impacted a hospital which led to deaths and difficulty in treating the injured (Joplin, 2011). In the Wood County scenario, even though ProMedica Bay Park would have been in the ‘near-complete destruction’ area, the Toledo area has eight other hospitals. This includes three level-one trauma centers and two standalone emergency rooms, all of which could handle patients from a disaster of this scale. Joplin, on the other hand, only had one other, less damaged hospital to rely on (2011).

These differences have the potential to change the dynamic of the entire event, and may alone spare loss of life in a similar situation in Wood County. Still, the lessons researchers learned from Joplin — even down to the nature of the deaths and locations of those victims — paint a perhaps more important picture that focuses more on preparedness than demographics.

Recommendations for
Wood County
Based on Joplin’s
lessons Learned

Mitigation

Mitigating the threat posed by tornadoes is a difficult task. Tornadoes are all but unpredictable, typically affect small areas, and are rarely as violent as they were in Joplin or even in Lake Township. Building codes are of incredible importance in an all-hazards mindset: fires, tornadoes, earthquakes and the like. But a building cannot be reasonably and affordably built to withstand 200+ mile-per-hour winds; the limited risk does not outweigh the cost. Instead, emphasis should continue to be place on providing basements or other reinforced “safe rooms” — smaller areas designed to withstand such violent weather.

Special attention should be paid to buildings housing the ill and elderly. This detail was specifically mentioned multiple times in the NIST investigation. It was determined that St. Johns Hospital “did not provide life-safety protection for all occupants,” (2013). In addition to the 12 fatalities at that hospital, another two people died in the Meadows Healthcare facility (2013). Ensuring these buildings specifically address threats of extreme weather to protect its often helpless occupants should be on the radar of not only building inspectors, but legislators and community leaders.

Preparedness

Preparedness should focus on aggressive public education. Public education for tornado safety is an uphill battle: fighting the complacency from false-alarms, misinformation from multiple sources, and decades of stories passed down from generation to generation detailing ‘why a tornado won’t hit us.’ All of these came into play in Joplin, as earlier mentioned. The false alarms are constantly being assessed by the National Weather Service as part of their common practice, so an emergency manager does not have to focus efforts on that primary source of information. Focus should be on establishing reliable resources for information and ensuring the message matches the sender. For example, if a fire department social media page begins posting severe weather warnings, community members may assume that is a primary source of information and turn to that page for information during an event. If said fire department is unable to provide updates due to focusing on their response-based mission, citizens may be left with a false sense of security that it is not bad enough for the fire department to post anything.

Instead, any outlet that is not a primary source of information (i.e., NWS, local media) should refer to those organizations, specifically mentioning that citizens should ‘follow’ those pages for the reliable, consistent updates. Special mention should be made by these secondary sources that they are not to be the first-stop for information during an emergency if an organization cannot support such a responsibility.

Worse yet are a growing number of weather social media pages that are not run by meteorologists, but anyone who has access to weather maps and the internet. These pages have a tendency to rely on uninterpreted data or inexperienced interpretations, increasing the ‘false alarm’ effect. Citizens, from the author’s experience as a broadcast journalist for eight years, have trouble differentiating between reliable sources and unreliable sources. These pages do a disservice to outlets that are working to decrease false alarms in an effort to decrease complacency and increase safety of our communities.

Any means of emergency communication — whether it be social media or a reverse 9-1-1 system — ought to be consistent, reliable, and effective. As mentioned, Joplin’s reverse 9-1-1 system did not meet these requirements and a valuable tool that could have been used was ignored. It will never be known how many, if any, lives could have been saved with a dire message about an impending tornado — but, such notification would have fallen into the unfamiliarity and sense of urgency cited by interviewees that drove them to take shelter (2013).

Lastly, a public education campaign must focus on misconceptions. Word-of-mouth stories in Northwest Ohio explain why the Maumee River, Lake Erie, and other geographical features exempt the area from a tornado threat — despite a recent, deadly tornado in Lake Township. As in Joplin, these stories have stood the test of time and those working against them have to present reality and a need to prepare is a challenge in that it requires overcoming generations of lore.

Conclusion

Communities across the United States face many of the same challenges in mitigating and preparing for such an unpredictable disaster as a tornado. It is vital that we constantly examine how other communities handled such trying circumstances. We should also closely analyze the incident as NIST did to draw lessons that can save lives when the next event occurs. Creating a hypothetical scenario with a basis in a real-world incident highlights similarities, differences, and brings a sense of realism to discussions to improve our mitigation and preparedness. All that said, this approach is just one piece of a much larger puzzle that is emergency management.

References