Joplin, which the reports said was in the direct path of the tornado, was left isolated and in the dark after the destruction, with telephone connections largely cut off and many homes without electricity after the twister touched down around 6 p.m.
Reuters quoted the Newton County coroner, Mark Bridges, as saying about 30 people had been killed, and 11 bodies had been recovered from just one location.
A major hospital in town, St. John’s Regional Medical Center, had to be abandoned, witnesses said, and the triage unit set up on its grounds to care for the patients had to be temporarily moved across the street when the hospital caught fire.
The tornado was just the latest in a string of deadly twisters that have killed hundreds of people in recent months, with Tuscaloosa, Ala., still recovering from one that also tore through the center of the city in late April.
Initial reports from Joplin said that schools, apartment buildings, megastores and fire stations were ravaged by the tornado.
“There was panic — firefighters were pulling themselves out of the debris and then helping others,” said Mike Bettes, a meteorologist for the Weather Channel who arrived in Joplin 10 minutes after the tornado touched down, as part of the show “The Great Tornado Hunt.”
Hours later, he said, the scene was “very serene — dark, relatively quiet.” He and his Weather Channel crew had set up to report from the hospital grounds, he said in a telephone interview, and “we are on a hill and the only lights we see are on the fire trucks or ambulances.”
Joplin’s was by far the worst damage on a day of brutal storms in the Midwest, including a tornado in Minneapolis that city officials said left one person dead and dozens injured in an area that covered several blocks. By Sunday night, Missouri’s governor, Jay Nixon, had already activated the National Guard and declared a state of emergency.
President Obama said the Federal Emergency Management Agency was being sent.
“FEMA is working with the affected area’s state and local officials to support response and recovery efforts, and the federal government stands ready to help our fellow Americans as needed,” Mr. Obama said.
Weather experts were still trying to assess exactly what had produced such damage. “The power lines have gone down — we can’t reach anyone there,” Bill Davis, a meteorologist at the Springfield, Mo., office of the National Weather Service, said in a telephone interview. He said any assessment of exactly how strong the tornado was would have to wait until tomorrow, when experts would drive to Joplin. However, he said, on a scale from 1 to 10, the tornado looked to be “on the 8-9 level.”
He compared it to a tornado that struck in May 2008 and left a dozen dead in the same part of Missouri. “It very much looked like that supercell,” he said, though that storm managed to spare Joplin a direct hit.
Joplin, a city of about 49,000 people, sits at the edge of the Ozark Mountain region.
Mr. Bettes, the meteorologist, said that the storm that hit Joplin had been hard to read — which was why his crew was willing to travel so close to it. “It was a rain-wrapped tornado,” he said. “When it is obscured by rain, you can’t tell what the danger is.”
One Joplin resident, Donald Davis, described to The Springfield News-Leader driving through the city, saying that Joplin High School’s windows were broken out and part of its roof was missing. A church across the street was demolished, he said. He also described damage to a grocery store and a large apartment building.
“They’re flattened,” Mr. Davis said. “You just can’t believe it. There must have been 150 units. One lady had a bathrobe around her. Others just had blankets around them.”
The scene at St. John’s hospital was equally overwhelming. “I spoke to a couple of nurses who were on the sixth floor,” said Mike Jenkins, a senior producer at Weather Channel who was with Mr. Bettes at the hospital. “They told me they received a warning, that a tornado or possible tornado was 20 minutes away. They took their precaution, ran through their steps, and five minutes later the windows were blown out, people were blown across the hall.”
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