Upon returning from Europe, President Obama will be visiting Joplin, Missouri today. President Obama will be surveying the damage caused by the tornadoes that ravaged through the area and participating in a memorial service for those who lost their lives. Obama will also be offering federal assistance to the grief-stricken area. Read the full article after the jump.
@Julie1205
President Barack Obama is pivoting from diplomacy on the world stage to the intimate and delicate domestic task of acting as healer-in-chief to a devastated community.
The president travels to tornado-wrecked Joplin, Mo., on Sunday, a day after returning from a six-day European tour of Ireland, England, France and Poland.
After days of focusing on the U.S. relationship with the rest of the world, he’ll turn to an even more critical connection: his own, with the American people.
The president will visit with survivors and family members of the worst tornado in decades, a monster storm that tore through Joplin a week ago leaving more than 120 dead and hundreds more injured. A hundred more are unaccounted for, and the damage is massive.
The president will tour destroyed neighborhoods in the city of 50,000 in southwestern Missouri, and speak at a memorial service being held by local clergy and Gov. Jay Nixon for those who lost their lives. He’ll offer federal assistance, and his own condolences.
It’s a role Obama has had to assume with increasing frequency of late, after the mass shooting in Arizona in January in which Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was injured, when tornadoes struck Tuscaloosa, Ala., last month and more recently when flooding from the Mississippi inundated parts of Memphis, Tenn.
Such moments can help define a president, but habitually even-tempered Obama is more apt to offer handshakes and hugs than tears and deep emotion.
Thousands more people far beyond Joplin had been waiting for good news about a teen believed to have been ejected or sucked from his vehicle on the way home from graduation. Several social-networking efforts specifically focused on finding information about Will Norton.
But his family says he, too, is among the dead — found in a pond near where his truck was located.
“At least we know that he wasn’t out there suffering,” his aunt Tracey Presslor said, holding a framed portrait of her 18-year-old nephew at a news conference. “Knowing that he was gone right away was really a blessing for us.”
Joplin City Manager Mark Rohr said Saturday during a news conference that the death toll rose by three to at least 142, but later revised that figure down to 139 without elaboration.
Mike O’Connell, a spokesman for the Missouri Department of Public Safety, told The Associated Press on Saturday that he could not confirm the city’s updated death toll number. He said the state of Missouri currently places the death toll at 126, saying they have no reason to raise that number.
State officials say there are 142 sets of human remains at the morgue handling those killed by the storm and some could be from the same victim.
If the death toll does stand at 139, it would place this year’s tornado death toll at 520 and make 2011 the deadliest year for tornadoes since 1950. Until now, the highest recorded death toll by the National Weather Service in a single year was 519 in 1953. There were deadlier storms before 1950, but those counts were based on estimates and not on precise figures.
On Saturday night, the Department of Public Safety made public a list of 73 people who had been confirmed dead and whose next of kin had been notified.
The tornado — an EF-5 packing 200 mph winds —also injured more than 900 people. Tallying and identifying the dead and the missing has proven a complex, delicate and sometimes confusing exercise for both authorities and loved ones.
Missouri officials said Saturday that the number of people unaccounted for stands at 100. The Missouri Department of Public Safety said that within that number, nine people have been reported dead by their families, but state officials are working to confirm those.
Newton County coroner Mark Bridges said most, if not all, of the people brought to the temporary morgue could be identified this weekend. He described officials there as “making real good progress.”
After a mistake immediately after the storm — four people thought they had identified one person’s body, only to be wrong — authorities are relying instead on dental records, photos and unique tattoos or piercings, Bridges said. They’ve also used DNA tests in a handful of cases, he said.
“We learned the hard way at the start,” he said. “It’s bad for the families.”
Asked about calls to open the morgue to all families of the missing, Bridges said doing so would be impractical. He described the site as a number of dark, refrigerated trailers holding body bags.
“There’s no place to let them into,” he said.
There have been 1,333 preliminary tornado reports in the U.S. through May 27, officials said, while the average number of confirmed tornadoes in a single year during the past decade has been 1,274.
Presslor said Saturday that the family received confirmation of his death late Friday night. She said her nephew’s body was not found sooner because there was so much debris in the pond.
Family members had previously told The Associated Press that Norton and his father were still on the road when the storm hit. Mark Norton urged his son to pull over, but the teen’s Hummer H3 flipped several times, throwing the young man from the vehicle, likely through the sunroof.
Mark Norton remains in the hospital and is “having a really tough time” after being told his son’s body was found, Presslor said.
About a dozen of Norton’s classmates stood in the back of the room as she spoke. His funeral arrangements are pending.
Presslor thanked the thousands of people who posted good wishes for Norton on Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites, and thanked all those who helped look for him. She urged those volunteers to keep looking for other people still missing.
“Please don’t give up,” she said.
