Although the National Weather Service said there was a warning nearly 20 minutes before the storm entered the town, CNN reported, false alarms over the years deterred people from taking shelter. Part of what made the Joplin tornado so devastating was how unprepared people were. Before the modern records, the worst in 1925 and killed nearly 700 people as it blasted through three states. Still, Joplin’s tornado was the deadliest on the list, NOAA’s National Weather Service said, surpassing a record held since 1953. In the last several decades, some years had multiple EF5 tornadoes while other times there were stretches of a few years without one. Such a wave is not entirely unheard of - April 3, 1974, saw seven EF5 tornadoes, for example. However, six of those alone were in April and May 2011. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Storm Prediction Center said there have been fewer than 60 of those twisters since 1950 when the country started keeping such records, with only nine of them in this century. Thankfully, such fierce tornadoes are relatively rare: The U.S. Entire neighborhoods were leveled in Joplin, a town of about 50,000 people. An EF5 has wind speeds higher than 200 mph. The damage the tornado left behind was intense. The EF5 twister, reaching the most destructive rating on the tornado scale, killed more than 150 people and injured many more on May 22, 2011. Six years have passed since a massive tornado crashed down on Joplin, Missouri, carving a path of destruction as it wove its way through the town.
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