JOPLIN, Missouri—The death toll from Sunday’s tornado is now 116, city officials said on Monday afternoon, with an estimated 400 injured. But there was some good news, city manager Mark Rohr said: Rescuers pulled seven people from the debris on Monday. The rescue effort will continue through the night.

“We’re going to cover every foot of this town to make sure every person here, who was here, is accounted for,” Gov. Jay Nixon said. “...There are still lives out there that need to be saved.”

The tornado, estimated to be an EF4 by the National Weather Service, tore a six-mile-long path from one-half to three-quarters of a mile wide through the middle of Joplin on Sunday. Much of the city’s south side was leveled, with churches, schools, businesses and homes reduced to ruins by winds estimated as high as 190 mph to 198 mph. Officials have estimated 2,000 buildings were damaged.

Rescuers have made three sweeps, block by block, in their search for survivors. Authorities have not released names or other details of the victims.

“There are going to be some things out there that are hard to see and hard to stomach,” Nixon said.

The harsh images will stick in people’s minds.

Not just the denuded trees, or the buildings twisted or turned to rubble, or the cars blown with such horrendous force that they were literally heaped and fused together like sculpture.

It’s the faces of people, loved ones and strangers.

Like that of the five-year-old boy found dead and crumpled beneath the tangle of steel and mountain of bricks that was once Joplin High School. The boy’s mother cried in grief when she heard.

“I’m devastated inside,” said Luke McCormick, the shaken 19-year-old volunteer rescue worker who helped lift the boy’s limp body from the debris.

Crews found bodies in vehicles the storm had flipped over, torn apart and left crushed like empty cans. Triage centers and temporary shelters quickly filled to capacity. At Memorial Hall, a downtown entertainment venue, emergency workers treated critically injured patients.

At another makeshift unit at a Lowe’s home improvement store, wooden planks served as beds. Outside, ambulances and fire trucks waited for calls. In the early hours of the morning, emergency vehicles were scrambling nearly every two minutes.

After daybreak, survivors picked through the rubble of their homes, salvaging clothes, furniture, family photos and financial records, the air pungent with the smell of gas and smoking embers.

Some neighborhoods were completely flattened and the leaves stripped from trees, giving the landscape an apocalyptic aura. In others where structures still stood, families found their belongings jumbled as if someone had picked up their homes and shaken them.

Some looting was reported.

Outside McAuley Catholic High School, which had been turned into an impromptu triage center, Carolene Coleman, 70, dropped her head. Her voice quavered. Her eyes pooled with tears as she sat scraped and bruised in a wheelchair, her ankle bandaged.

All they were doing, Coleman said, was stopping for a drink at the Elk’s Lodge. Then the twister roared and ripped. There was no basement; nowhere was safe.

“The roof collapsed on everybody,” she said. She was crushed. Her husband, Clyde, 74, lay on top of her, his body still, for nearly six hours. They were married for 54 years. Everyone was screaming, “Help! Help us!”

She knew the truth.

“He’s dead,” she said.