Parkersburg Tornado

(Posted by Owen, May 27th, 2008, Write a comment »)

On Sunday evening, May 24th 2008, a tornado tore through Parkersburg, IA. It may be classified as an F4. Six people lost their lives, 70 injured; 222 homes were completely destroyed, more than 400 were damaged. The tornado started in Parkersburg and stayed on the ground for more than 6 miles, continuing to do damage in New Hartford, IA, the birthplace of Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley.

Mom’s house (actually belonged to the church) was completely destroyed. Mom was fine. She hid out in the bathroom in the basement, and came upstairs without difficulty. Mom is currently staying with some parishioners, and through some church restructuring with New Hartford, God had already lined up a new place for her to live!

Emily and Andrew drove to her that night, and Michael, Bob, and I drove up on Monday (Memorial Day) to help clean up. The damage is awe-inspiring. See the pictures below, click on them for more detail. In particular, look at the horizons, and see how far the damage continues. I can’t effectively describe the scene, but I can try: It looks like matchsticks were piled up where houses used to stand. All of the trees are barren and the branches are all broken in the same direction. Actually, the trees are only barren of leaves; clothes and aluminum siding are mangled on the trunks. Cars, smashed and windowless, are lined up on the sides of the roads, presumably pushed there with the equipment of first-responders. People are everywhere, sorting through piles of debris, pulling out and piling up heaps of stuff. Cars line both sides of the streets and are all filled with things salvaged. ATVs and trucks go up and down, giving people rides, distributing water, and announcing where food and first aid can be found. The high school parking lot is filled with tents, ambulances, firetrucks, and volunteer firefighters, first aid workers, Red Cross volunteers, Salvation Army, US Reservists. There are grills out with hot dogs and hamburgers, and buckets and buckets of bottled water. Later on in the day, demolition machinery started showing up and pulling down houses that weren’t safe to stand. The houses were spraypainted with checkmarks and OKs if safe to enter. Again, people were everywhere, standing in groups, shirtless and sunburnt men, firefighters with their gear on, reservists in fatigues, uniformed police.

We were able to find a lot of the more priceless memories. The closets were fairly well protected. Mom’s entire bedroom was stripped and, as we found later, down the street. Her bedroom was stripped of even the carpet, leaving only one wall and the tacking strip along the edges. That’s all. The living room was gone, all china was smashed into tiny pieces, chairs broken into kindling. I never saw more of the sofa than one cushion. The front wall of the living room fell straight outward, crushing the front porch. Some firefighters came by later and lifted up the wall so that we could verify there was nothing beneath it to salvage. We never saw anything of the roof or the garage. Mom’s car was smashed, all windows broken out.

The basement was in better shape. All windows had been broken out and a fine layer of grass and mud was plastered over everything. There is now a rising level of water in the basement without the sump pump. Mom was definitely in the safest place she could have possibly been in: A mostly-interior windowless room in the basement, in the shower stall.

I have a movie as well that I may post at some later date. For now, see the damage for yourself. Don’t ask me what happens now for Parkersburg, I don’t know. Mom is safe and has a place to live and a job. Some people lost all three.

Welcome!

(Posted by admin, November 27th, 2007, Write a comment »)

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