It has been just about 15 years since an EF-5 tornado — the strongest classification we have for these sorts of storms — struck Joplin, Missouri, causing widespread devastation.
That tornado spent 38 minutes on the ground, tearing through churches, schools, retirement homes, grocery stores and thousands of homes. More than 160 people were killed — making it the deadliest storm in more than 60 years.
Within hours, federal officials were trying to figure out how to make sure that sort of devastation won’t happen again. Among them was Marc Levitan, who is now the lead research engineer for the National Windstorm Impact Reduction Program at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Levitan’s work takes lessons learned in disasters like Joplin and turns it into standards that inform building codes around the world to prevent future storms from being so deadly.
The result is that, while we may never be able to perfectly predict tornados and will almost certainly never be able to stop them, we can save more lives.
