![]() through May 27, officials said, while the average number of confirmed tornadoes in a single year during the past decade has been 1,274. There have been 1,333 preliminary tornado reports in the U.S. "There's no place to let them into," he said. He described the site as a number of dark, refrigerated trailers holding body bags. "It's bad for the families."Īsked about calls to open the morgue to all families of the missing, Bridges said doing so would be impractical. "We learned the hard way at the start," he said. They've also used DNA tests in a handful of cases, he said. He described officials there as "making real good progress."Īfter 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. The storm killed around 160 people, caused 2.8 billion in damage and forever. Newton County coroner Mark Bridges said most, if not all, of the people brought to the temporary morgue could be identified this weekend. To get a sense of the enormous challenge officials face in trying to get an accurate body count in the wake of a disaster like Moore, TIME spoke to Rob Chappel, coroner for Jasper County, Missouri, who was charged with counting the dead from the May 2011 tornado in Joplin, Missouri that killed 161 people. ![]() "Some of those remains may be the same person," she said. A temporary morgue for tornado victims has as many as 142 human remains, deputy director Andrea Spillars said earlier Saturday, but that includes partial remains. ![]() 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. Missouri officials said Saturday that the number of people unaccounted for stands at 100. The state has been working to pare down the list of people missing and unaccounted for in the wake of the deadliest single U.S. There were deadlier storms before 1950, but those counts were based on estimates and not on precise figures. Until now, the highest recorded death toll in a single year was 519 in 1953. The tornado death toll for 2011 is now 523. That makes this the deadliest year for tornadoes since 1950, based on an assessment of figures from the National Weather Service.
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