[Note: This article commemorates the thirteenth anniversary of the Joplin tornado of May 22, 2011, the most lethal twister since 1948. The piece originally appeared in The Technoskeptic, and was later reprinted in The New Oxford Review.]
Electronic distraction keeps reaching new milestones. Johnny might not be able to read, but he has mastered Grand Theft Auto. Thousands of young gadget aficionados are prescribed Adderall or Ritalin to counteract the symptoms of excess screen time. Thousands more die or are injured each year because someone at the controls of a car, bus, or ship succumbs to the same compulsion. Last but not least, an entire city looks the other way during its tornadic obliteration.
You won’t find this last item mentioned in the media. For one thing, it happened over a decade ago — ancient history in today’s news cycle. For another, media may have exacerbated the calamity, which helps explain the delay in this reportage. With apologies to media theorist Marshall McLuhan, the medium in this case may have been an accessory to manslaughter.
Before trying to decipher what it all means, let’s return to the scene of an old, unsolved mystery. To paraphrase an old saw, those who don’t know recent history are doomed to recycle it.
On the evening of May 22, 2011, my brother called me from Kansas City on a landline telephone: “Did you hear,” Mark asked, “that a tornado just wiped Joplin off the map?” Mark and I know something about what it is to have your city, or at least large sections of it, sucked away. Topeka, our hometown, was hit in 1966 by a twister so monumental that the damage in monetary terms surpassed that of any previous tornado. Legend has it that the storm was conjured by the ghosts of Potawatomi Indians angry at city fathers who had capped their tribe’s ancestral burial mound with a water tank. The tornado made its retaliatory appearance directly over the top of the mound.
In Joplin there was no atmospheric backstory, except climate change; even so, nature’s revenge seemed much harsher. Though the areas of damage wreaked by the two storms were roughly equal, ten times as many people died in 2011. This in spite of modern warning systems, which are far more sophisticated. In Topeka the death toll was 16. In Joplin it was 160. No city had lost so many to an inland meteorological event since Woodward, Oklahoma, in 1948, when 180 died during a nighttime cyclone. Woodward was unwarned. Joplin was blanketed by warnings, and the storm happened in broad daylight.
Today, I live in St. Louis, a three-hour drive from Joplin. About a month after my brother’s call, I was at a Cardinals game and bumped into a man from the devastated town. As we chatted, he mentioned that he volunteered at a church that provided shelter for victims. I couldn’t help asking about the extreme casualty count. “Why do you think so many died?”
“Entertainment,” he replied, not skipping a breath.
From his personal contact with those who had been through the storm, he’d sensed that, for all too many, catching the twister on social media beat taking cover. I hadn’t read or heard anything about this in the mainstream media, so the next chance I got, I went to the library and began scrolling through YouTube offerings (as an advocate of media minimalism, I did not have Internet access at home until the coronavirus pandemic shut down my local library branch).
One of the many Joplin videos showed someone sitting in a car at the drive-thru of Kentucky Fried Chicken, the grim airborne reaper hovering over her as she pays for what might have been her last chicken dinner. Another video, taken by New Zealanders on a storm-chasing tour, shows the funnel cloud about to descend on them as they move through traffic along Joplin’s main commercial strip. Seemingly more attuned to looming catastrophe than others around them, they bemoan the impending fate of the town. Shortly before escaping onto a freeway ramp in what must have been mere moments before the tornado engulfs the motorists behind them, someone is heard to lament, “Poor Joplin.”
The most harrowing of the selections was recorded by Isaac Duncan, a man in his early 20s who was overtaken by the storm yet lived to tell the tale. The transcript from this recording serves as the dramatic climax to an award-winning Esquire article (Sept. 2011) that vividly portrays the event.
Duncan explains that he was driving around town with two of his friends as weather conditions deteriorated, listening to the St. Louis Cardinals play the Kansas City Royals on the radio. The game kept getting interrupted by tornado updates, but they kept on driving, and Duncan began videoing the worsening weather. Then came an unusual announcement: There could be no more news about the weather because the station’s storm-tracking capabilities had blown away.
It occurred to the three friends that the scenes they were recording might be taking place IRL (“in real life,” in Webspeak). One glanced upward and saw a colossal rotating cloud rapidly descending on them. Panic struck. Seeing a gas station convenience store down the block, they made a dash for it. Duncan’s recording begins here — nearly pitch black and visually unintelligible — as they enter the building and join about 20 others. Within about two minutes, everyone has scrambled into a walk-in cooler, which is where the audio gets terrifying: the sounds of final prayers, screams, and declarations of love. What can’t be seen (but is revealed in the article) is one person’s levitation toward an opening in the ceiling--stopped in the nick of time when someone grabbed his belt. Amazingly, all survived. Outside the Quiktrip, others weren’t so lucky.
Social critic Neil Postman’s 1985 pronouncement that we were “amusing ourselves to death” gains prophetic resonance in view of those who may have lost their lives in Joplin because they were distracted.
McLuhan observed no less prophetically that when media pool together, they can form a whirlwind, a “maelstrom.” The question becomes, did media coalesce in Joplin to form the perfect storm? What set Joplin apart from other cities engulfed recently by gigantic gyres, such as Tuscaloosa, Alabama, that were spared a gigantic death toll? Presumably, Alabamians were no less in thrall to the same devices used by Missourians.
I decided to don the spectacles of a sleuth and make a little trip southwest. When I met the church volunteer, the city was still deep in the process of recovery. It seemed tactless to start snooping so soon, so I held off awhile. My deeper query, after all, was not so much about Joplin, Missouri, but about these emerging Online States of America. The story would keep.
Two years passed before I tooled through the hills of southern Missouri, arriving in Joplin on a cool September afternoon to find the rubble cleared away and brand-new houses dotting the landscape. On Range Line Boulevard, where the tornado had done its worst — leveling Walmart, Home Depot, and Pizza Hut, and killing dozens — glistening facsimiles of those stores had sprouted up as if they had always been there.
Had I arrived too late? Had the memories been erased along with the debris? Decidedly not; even two years later, almost everyone I ran across had a story to tell, as if waiting to be unburdened of the terrifying images replaying in their heads.
One elderly man was watching TV until a few seconds before the tornado blew his house apart. He had just enough time to dive into the bathroom and hug the toilet for dear life. After a deafening clatter that lasted a minute or so, he looked up and found himself alone with his toilet on an empty concrete slab.
Three middle-aged sisters told three geographically disparate, cliff-hanger stories, each culminating in a miraculous moment of rescue: one from mounds of debris, another from a headlong trip into the sky, and another from disgorgement through a trembling basement door held back from the wind only by the superhuman strength of her teenage grandson.
I visited a married couple whose home had been disassembled around them and strewn to the four winds as they, too, clung to the bathroom fixtures.
From these and other accounts, four themes kept recurring: (1) while the media reported that rain enshrouded the tornado (thus seemingly explaining why many missed it), the signs of its approach were unmistakable if you took the trouble to examine the sky; (2) tornado sirens sounded twice but most people shrugged them off because in Joplin they sounded even during ordinary thunderstorms; (3) news media conveyed the strong impression that the tornado was moving north of town, not toward the south-central part of the city where it actually struck; and finally, (4) given the degree to which the populace had come to rely on media in place of their own eyeballs for weather reports, the mistake was missed until it was impossible not to see, and then it was often too late.
Of all the stories I heard, one made this point the most clearly. I heard it from a petite woman named Breannia, a waitress in the Hunan Garden restaurant on Main Street. I lunched there the first day, and when I mentioned why I was visiting, she proceeded without pause into a gripping narrative of her family’s near-death experience. They were driving south along Range Line during the peak of the tempest, her father frequently consulting radio bulletins. The most recent had placed the funnel cloud at the intersection of Seventh and Schifferdecker, a spot on the north side of Joplin, which was why they were fleeing south. But when they pulled even with Home Depot — well into the southern portion of Joplin — there it was, just to the west. The word tornado didn’t seem to do it justice. Whatever it was was far too big and close for them to escape. To quote Breannia, “You could see roofs flying like in a movie. They were exploding into the air. Everything was crunching and cracking. It was the worst thing ever. It was louder than a train. Your ears hurt from it, from all the suction. And all the time we were stuck in traffic. ‘Can you believe it?’ my dad was saying. ‘They’re still obeying the traffic lights!’”
Desperate, he pulled into a driveway and found shelter in an empty garage—just in time for descending 200-mile-per-hour winds to disassemble the structure around them. To keep the car from being sucked back out into the tempest, Breannia’s dad pressed his foot hard on the accelerator and as he did, he yelled at the others to hit the floor. Several long minutes passed as boards pummeled the vehicle, the windows blew out, and eardrums went bonkers under air pressure changes. But the winds eventually subsided and they were able to drive away from the remains of the garage. Later they learned that several residents of the home on the same property had died while they were undergoing their ordeal.
When Breannia finished her story, I strained to take in its import. The bulletins that had sent her family on its near-suicide mission appeared to have been blatantly inaccurate. But they had originated from the National Weather Service. What was going on? Breannia herself had no idea, and no one had ever explained it to her or her family.
The scent of my quarry led to the halls of officialdom. But at Joplin City Hall and the National Weather Service office in Springfield, I met smooth deflections. None of the officials concerned would admit to anything. When I tried interviewing one of the local TV meteorologists, he was happy to talk at first, but the closer I came to the point, the less forthcoming he became. It was only with the help of an outside meteorologist working for a private company that I was able to piece together what actually happened. The expert was Mike Smith, and he worked for AccuWeather Enterprise Solutions, based in Wichita.
Smith told me that, in the first place, tornado sirens had been sounding too often there — four to five times more frequently than in the adjoining counties of Oklahoma. This lulled people into complacency through overuse. It seems even the National Weather Service eventually realized this. In a July 2011 assessment, it reported that “the perceived frequency of siren activation in Joplin led the majority of survey participants to become desensitized or complacent” (emphasis in original). Although the use of italics seems defensive, the assessment goes on to reveal that, “nationally, 76% of all NWS Tornado Warnings, in their totality, are false alarms,” a shockingly high number.
Second and more crucially, Smith explained that the NWS bulletins described a course that veered by about 45 degrees from the actual direction of the storm. The man reading the radar at the NWS office during the critical minutes must have been somehow confused by what he saw on Doppler Radar. This was easy for Smith to infer because he had seen the same images in real time but attributed a different trajectory to them, which formed the basis of his own company’s more accurate bulletins. (These, however, were issued to private clients like the Missouri and Northern Arkansas Railroad. The rail line, accordingly, evacuated its employees and suspended service to the area, but the lifesaving information was not available to the Joplin public.) In the NWS assessment, the agency claimed that the confusion over the trajectory of the tornado stemmed from two separate and adjacent warnings for two separate storm cells, which the public conflated into one. However, Smith believed that this was a bureaucratic dodge meant to cover up faulty and insufficient warnings. In his view, the radar was crystal clear, and the mistaken report was inexcusable. He told me, “I simply do not understand how the Springfield NWS got it so wrong.”
The Springfield operator, once settled on his erroneous reading, kept deferring to it, and the local TV and radio reporters, by extension, did the same. (The word extension is a kind of double entendre. In McLuhan’s media lexicon, all media are human “extensions” that both transmit and reshape our messages and intentions. Weather forecasting instruments are no less media than TV and radio stations, the latter, in a sense, being extensions of extensions.)
In other words, here is what separated Joplin from the other locales recently visited by large tornadoes: As in other places, some Joplin residents may have allowed media to upstage, or distract them from, the real thing. But only in Joplin did a man in the forecasting booth make a mistake that enabled the public to persist in their diversions.
Did it all, then, come down to error, ordinary human error — error that media merely extended? Although the radar operator admitted no mistake when I interviewed him by email, Smith believes he was at fault. One person blew it; others got blown away; end of story.
Yet from another angle, the “error” could be read as a sign of something more profound and unsettling: surrender to media qua media, the decline of the ability to correlate image and reality or tell one from the other. In this case, a tornado originating in Kansas carried with it what might be called the Curse of Oz: When a wizard becomes enamored of his own wizardry, he starts to confuse it with the truth. We are all enamored of our digital wizardry right now.
Let’s be clear: Modern weather forecasting tools, particularly Doppler Radar, have lengthened warning times on tornadoes, giving people precious extra minutes to seek shelter. Ultimately, a deadly act of nature is just that — a tragedy that is the fault of no person. Smith believes the storm-warning system in general has saved “tens of thousands of lives.” Though it is difficult to be sure of all the causes, tornado fatalities have declined dramatically since their peak in the 1920s. We will never know how many might have perished in Joplin had there been no warnings whatsoever.
At the same time, it bears asking if we have relied on these tools to the exclusion of our own judgment, particularly when the same device offers both predictive warnings and distracting entertainment. While weather forecasting can be lifesaving, we should never lose our direct grounding in the real world via our senses. In my interviews, those who took time carefully to observe the weather, even if the tornado was ten or 20 minutes away, were much less likely to come into harm’s way than those who merely relied on weather reports.
A woman named Billie, who worked at a local classifieds newspaper, told me her husband was driving them along Range Line on their way to Office Depot when he noticed dark clouds unlike any he’d ever seen billowing up in the western sky. They had planned to browse office furniture, but an inner voice told him not to turn into the parking lot. Heeding that voice may well have saved their lives.
Another woman who was watching the tornado report on TV told me she went outside and looked at the sky, saw it was an unusual color, then noticed that the leaves in her ornamental tree were blowing in circles. She dashed back in, grabbed her grandchildren, and took them into the crawl space. Her house was a complete loss.
Whichever interpretation is most persuasive, one fact stands above the others: In this case, McLuhan’s “media maelstrom” became more than a metaphor. Once unleashed by the mistaken operator, the faux whirlwind went wild. Virtual tornado that it was, it lifted off the electronic screen and blew through the cognitive defenses of a real city, upstaging the true menace. It spun events in a way that nobody could have predicted, bouncing by twists and turns from one electronic node to another, taking the citizenry off guard, waylaying those in its path.
In light of this singular event, the fate of Joplin, like that of Topeka, may recall its own cosmic backstory, one we Westerners all share. There is a scene in The Odyssey in which the title character avails himself of a gift from Aeolus, god of the winds. Aeolus stuffs the ill winds in an ox-skin sack and secures it in Odysseus’s ship, leaving the gentle west wind to smooth the passage home. But just in sight of Ithaca, Odysseus falls asleep, and the crew — covetous of the treasure they believe it contains — opens the sack. The winds escape, the seas convulse, and the ship meanders back to where it started.
As in ancient myth, we aspire to put the weather in a box: there it is on my iPhone. On my radar screen. Problem contained, problem codified. Only problem is: Controlling the weather, like controlling reality, is a prerogative of the gods. Media, at most, serve as frail linkages temporarily connecting us to the world and to each other, in the hope of widening understanding and, to some degree, parrying those forces. When we preserve the necessary distinctions between real and faux, the channels are open and clear, and the message is conveyed. But when we invert the relationship, we subject reality — and even ourselves — to media captivity. Reality can do nothing but break loose and disabuse us of our illusions. The gods will have their day.
Back in 1962 these dangers were all too clear to McLuhan. In an age when television was made of literal tubes, and most people got their news from daily papers, he was already reading the signs of coming storms and near-universal, quasi-ADHD. “The crossings or hybridizations of the media release great new force and energy as by fission or fusion,” he wrote. Media “are ‘make happen’ agents, but not ‘make aware’ agents.”
Only one question remains: Given our increasing reliance on media of all kinds, what’s next? We may never know. On that point McLuhan was terse: “To the blind all things are sudden.”