Cultural Anthropology Blog

Tyler Holland
Mr. Roddy
IHSS
15 September 2019
Natural Disaster - Space for Progress

On May 22 2011, a devastating tornado hit Joplin, Missouri. This tornado was an EF5 and was the deadliest tornado to ever hit the U.S. since 1950, killing 162 people and injuring more than 1000 others. This event makes us wonder about what kind of steps are being taken in Joplin to warn people about tornadoes and other natural disasters. A lot of time, tornado warnings are ignored or dismissed because people have seen tornado warnings in the past that turn out to be false and then they pay less attention to them after that. Another problem is that sometimes the warning is issued too late or not at all and people don't have time to properly prepare for the tornado and end up getting injured or killed.  These two problems are relatively contradictory because on one hand you don't want to always preemptively issue tornado warnings if people have proven to ignore them after a while, but you also don't want to send out a warning too late or not at all. Another big problem that can result in people being placed in an unsafe position is the fact that most tornado shelters are expensive and this can affect peoples access to them. It has also been found that elderly people often don't take the proper precautions because they simply weren't able to hear the issued warning, or they need more assistance to get to a safe area and aren't able to do it fast enough because their warning wasn't received quick enough. Suffering from a large scale disaster such as an EF5 tornado can affect a community as a whole, as they try to recover and move into the future. One example of this is, in the reconstruction of Joplin, a lot more thought was put in to building the foundation of houses and other buildings to be more sturdy and meet certain design standards in the event of another natural disaster. This is obviously only one of many ways that people will rebuild the community, and watching it adapt is the thing that people study because it is interesting to know how a town moves forward after being destroyed, do they try to rebuild or do most people try to move away, also what kind of toll does it have on the people and community aspect of the area.

https://www.longdom.org/open-access/natural-disaster-much-space-for-progress-2167-0587.1000e103.pdf 


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