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<h1 class="nist-page__title">NIST Joplin Tornado News Briefing: Opening Statement by Eric Letvin</h1>
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<div class="datetime"><time datetime="2013-11-21T12:00:00Z">November 21, 2013</time>
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<p>Eric Letvin<br>Director of Disaster and Failure Studies<br>National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)</p>
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<div class="text-long"><p>Missouri Southern State University<br>Joplin, Missouri</p></div>
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<p><a href="https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2013/11/nist-investigation-joplin-mo-tornado-details-proposed-measures-saving-lives">Back to News Release &gt;&gt;</a></p><p><a href="https://www.nist.gov/news-events/events/2013/11/press-briefing-webcast-joplin-tornado-investigation-draft-report-released">Back to webcast event &gt;&gt;</a></p><hr><p>Thank you, Howard. Good morning.</p><p>I'm pleased to be here this morning to talk with you about the major findings and recommendations from NIST's technical investigation of the Joplin tornado and its impact on the community.</p><p>As Howard has explained, NIST has legislative authority to investigate building failures with the intent of recommending improvements to building codes, standards and practices. Our goal with these disaster studies is always fact-finding, not fault-finding. To make the best use of our resources, we use specific criteria to carefully choose which events to investigate.</p><p>The Joplin tornado of May 22, 2011, was clearly an unusually powerful and tragic event. The tornado caused 161 fatalities, more than 1,000 injuries, and damaged close to 8,000 buildings, making it the deadliest and costliest single tornado since official record keeping began in 1950.</p><p>NIST deployed a team of experts to Joplin three days after the tornado. We quickly concluded that the large number of deaths and the specific types of building and infrastructure damage seen with this tornado, made it especially important to learn as much as we could about what happened and how lives and property might be better protected from such tornadoes in the future.</p><p>Our draft report is very detailed and has 47 findings and 16 recommendations. I'm not going to be able to describe them all this morning. Instead I'd like to tell you briefly about a few particularly central findings and recommendations. I'll also briefly explain where additional research is needed to fill gaps in our knowledge.</p><p>The overarching conclusion of our two-year study is that death and destruction from tornadoes <em>can</em> be reduced.</p><p>Based on a significant body of research and observations from such events, our scientific understanding of tornadoes and their effects has matured substantially. It's time to begin developing and implementing nationally accepted standards and codes that directly address tornado hazards.</p><p>Through stronger construction methods, enhanced emergency communications, and greater access to tornado-safe shelters, we can reduce the tremendous human and economic cost of these events on our communities.</p><p>We reached this conclusion by studying the following aspects of the Joplin event: tornado characteristics; building and infrastructure performance; human behavior; emergency communications; and the impacts of each on protecting people from tornadoes. To our knowledge, this is the first scientific study to address the intersection of these distinct areas for a specific tornado.</p><p>Our study team included experts in structural and fire engineering, extreme wind, meteorology and severe storms, and sociology for analysis of human behavior and emergency response. We were fortunate to have essential assistance from a number of different organizations. We want to specifically thank the City of Joplin, the State of Missouri, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, especially the National Weather Service and the National Severe Storms Laboratory, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.</p><p>Our data gathering and subsequent analysis efforts included:</p><ul><li>estimation of tornado wind speed and other characteristics based on observed damage;</li><li>field surveys of 25 key buildings in the damage area shortly after the tornado, and subsequent review of building designs and structural analyses to determine their performance during the tornado;</li><li>analysis of the emergency communications that took place prior to and during the tornado and the collection of experiences through interviews with 165 survivors, emergency responders, and family m
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<p>Eric Letvin<br>Director of Disaster and Failure Studies<br>National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)</p>
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Created November 20, 2013, Updated December 29, 2016
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