We're going to go through every foot of this town and make sure that every person is accounted for," Nixon told reporters. Some 1,150 wounded people were treated in area hospitals after Sunday's twister, The Joplin Globe reported. But weather forecasters warned of more storms approaching. "We are currently forecasting a major severe weather outbreak for Tuesday over the central United States with strong tornadoes likely over Oklahoma, Kansas, extreme northern Texas, southwest Missouri," said Russell Schneider, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Storm Prediction Center.

Officials said the last single twister to wreak such loss of life occurred on June 8, 1953 when 116 people were killed in Flint, Michigan. On Sunday, flames and smoke from broken gas lines shot up through the wreckage in Joplin as block after block of homes and businesses were reduced to rubble and cars were tossed so violently into the air that they turned into crumpled heaps of metal. Heavy rain, lightning and strong winds hampered relief efforts while hundreds of exhausted rescue workers carefully picked their way through the rubble with the help of sniffer dogs. Disaster struck late Sunday when, with just 24 minutes warning, the monster twister packing winds of up to 200 miles (320 kilometers) an hour tore through the center of town. More than 2,000 buildings or about a third of the city of 50,000 near the border with Kansas and Oklahoma were damaged or destroyed. Jeff Law, 23, was able to take shelter in a storm cellar and was overwhelmed by what he saw when he emerged.

Copyright APP (Associated Press of Pakistan), 2011Copyright AFP (Agence France-Presse), 2011