Joplin, Missouri’s 2011 tornado killed nearly 160 people and displaced about a third of the city, according to NPR’s May 23, 2026 report. The storm—described as a massive, multi-vortex tornado—was one of the deadliest in recorded U.S. history, and NPR said it was recorded at about three-quarters of a mile wide.
In the weeks after the disaster, NPR said the town’s attention shifted from devastation to a recovery effort marked by cooperation and extensive volunteer work. NPR reported that almost 100,000 volunteers from nearly every state arrived to help clean up debris and rebuild, with schools reopening on time the following fall.
NPR also highlighted that disaster researchers from Columbia University found that, six months after the tornado, there was “barely any polarization or political conflict” over the direction of the recovery. Within that early push, NPR described a range of help—from ranchers cooking steaks for volunteers to a university dean setting up cots at an emergency shelter after losing his own home—alongside efforts such as volunteers making balloon animals for children at shelters.
Darren Fullerton, who ran a Red Cross emergency shelter at Missouri Southern State University in Joplin after the tornado, told NPR that people “came out of the woodwork.” Melodee Colbert-Kean, Joplin’s vice-mayor at the time, said the process pulled residents out of their “silos” and helped them “remember that they’re human,” adding that the effort did not hinge on political affiliation.
NPR framed the phenomenon through social science research, citing Jamil Zaki, director of Stanford’s Social Neuroscience Lab and author of books on kindness and empathy. Zaki told NPR that a common misperception is that disasters bring out a “dog-eat-dog mentality” that leads to looting and criminal behavior, and he said people can instead identify with others as “survivors,” forming stronger bonds with those nearby. He compared the sudden shared identity to what people might feel on a bus hit by bombs or in a street struck by a tornado, as he put it to NPR.
The NPR report also described how residents carried forward the emotional and moral aftermath of trauma into later acts of service. Nanda Nunnelly, who said she survived while sheltering in a closet with her husband and dog during the storm, later told NPR she apologized on Facebook to a girl she bullied in eighth grade after a vision came to her during the tornado. NPR said Nunnelly moved back to Joplin five years later and joined the board of a local community center that shelters unhoused people during extreme weather events, describing the motivation to “give back” as something she felt viscerally.
NPR connected that personal turning point to a psychological idea discussed by Zaki: “altruism born of suffering.” Zaki told NPR that when people experience pain, they may find it easier to access the suffering of others and develop a stronger desire to do something about it, and the report cited examples such as people who have struggled with addiction becoming addiction counselors.
Keeping the compassion going, NPR reported that survivors’ shared experience helped create an ongoing identity in Joplin. Jane Cage, who volunteered as chairman for Joplin’s Citizens Advisory Recovery Team after the tornado, told NPR that even years later, newcomers can feel like outsiders because survivors can speak “in shorthand” about what happened; she described “an invisible bond” among them. NPR also said research has suggested that altruistic communities that emerge after disasters can fade within months after the defining trauma, but it reported that Zaki and John Drury, a social psychology professor at the University of Sussex in the U.K., said the ethos can be sustained through efforts like group meetings and commemorations.
In the years since the storm, NPR said Joplin residents used philanthropic recovery funds to form an organization called One Joplin, which now serves the needs of the city’s working poor and advocates for more affordable housing. Nicole Brown, One Joplin’s executive director, told NPR that the group’s core focus is continuing a sense of community and connection—“wanting a better community for all.” The report also described how Jay St. Clair, a minister who converted his church into a shelter for nursing home residents after the storm and then worked 18-hour days afterward, continued long-term service through a transitional housing program called God’s Resort.
NPR’s account also returned to what researchers say disasters can reveal about kindness—and about what people do once the immediate crisis passes. During the COVID-19 pandemic, NPR said Zaki’s lab asked 1,000 Americans whether they thought the pandemic made people kinder, and Zaki told NPR that more than half said it had not, while he argued that data from 150 countries showed acts of kindness increased across areas including volunteering, donations, and helping strangers.