History's Toughest Twisters

 

While the devastation in Joplin, Mo., from the tornado that hit on May 22, 2011, was horrific, tornadoes once wreaked even greater havoc on Americans. With ever improving forecasting and communication systems, death tolls from tornadoes have continued to significantly drop.
But that doesn’t help the residents of Joplin, whose tornado was the worst in the U.S. since the one in Flint, Mich., in 1953, which killed 115 people. The Joplin tornado, meanwhile, is the eighth deadliest tornado in U.S. history. (And the tornadoes aren't stopping anytime soon; twisters killed at least 14 people on May 25 in Oklahoma, Kansas and Arkansas.)
As death tolls mount in 2011, NewsFeed looks back to 1953, when a month before the Flint tornado, 114 people were killed in and around Waco, Texas. But even then, things weren’t as bad as in 1936, when three twisters on consecutive days in Mississippi, Georgia and Oklahoma combined to kill about 600 Americans.

Read more: http://newsfeed.time.com/2011/05/25/before-joplin-10-deadliest-tornadoes-in-u-s-history/#ixzz1NR3tbnBL