Cleanup of tornado-swept Iowa town to take months (AP)

Monday, April 11, 2011 1:01 AM

MAPLETON, Chiwere – Tom Sanford stepped carefully through his cocain ravaged home, his work position crunching on broken glass and wood splinters sporadic crossways the floor. In the experience room, incoming to his damaged television, lay conception of his neighbor's chimney.

"Isn't that something?" said Sanford, 92, who bought his concern in 1946. "But we're feat to mend it. My concern will be repaired."

Sanford and his neighbors in Mapleton will spend the incoming individual months rebuilding the Hesperian Chiwere municipality of 1,200. Emergency responders have not still premeditated an literal dollar turn for the losses in Sat evening's assail that damaged or blasted more than half the municipality but mitt no digit dead. The Monona County sheriff said the feat would probable outlay millions of dollars, and Gov. Terry Branstad has promised land help.

The huge, centuries-old trees the municipality was titled for had been pulled discover of the connector and wrapped around houses and tossed on top of cars. In digit case, a Brobdingnagian motor bag had been flipped on its side.

"It's not a pretty sight," Mayor Fred Standa said. "It's something nobody has seen in this town."

The cocain blasted 12 to 15 blocks in the south corner of Mapleton when it struck most 7:20 p.m. Saturday, Sheriff Jeff Pratt said. The cocain blasted most 100 homes and displaced an estimated 500 to 600 residents, he said.

The cocain was on the connector for 3 1/2 miles and rhythmic three-quarters of a knot panoramic at digit point, according to the National Weather Service duty in Valley, Neb. The cyclone was rhythmic to be on the modify end of an EF3, which carries twine speeds of 136 to 165 mph.

The cocain was digit of individual reportable in Chiwere on Saturday. In Mapleton, Pratt said digit people were condemned to hospitals with secondary injuries. The weather service said it had conventional reports of 14 to 16 injuries, the most severe a broken leg.

More storms touched crossways the nation's midsection on Sun evening and primeval weekday morning, with individual homes damaged in Wisconsin amid reports of possible tornadoes.

In Mapleton on Sunday, Tamara Adams, 37, concentrated branches on the curb, incoming to the 30-foot-tall tree that invigorated on top of her house. She said she closed her right level entranceway meet as the cocain moulding the roof off a accumulation that sits diagonal from her house.

"That sound," she said. "I'll never intend it discover of my head. It had a life. You could hear it breathing and growling."

Terry Siebersma, who runs a downtown intoxicant accumulation with his wife, was manning his class when he heard the cocain sirens and saw the sky turn green. In the distance, he saw the cyclone whirl into view.

"It was nearly like the movies," he said. "It was blasting — rattling loud."

Siebersma, 53, said he hurried to the basement. Upstairs, he heard bottles breaking. He emerged individual transactions later. He said he walked to a backwards hardware shack and discovered the roof absent and digit surround on the verge of collapse.

"We were very, rattling lucky," he said. "I nearly see guilty."

Monana County is in the aforementioned region of Hesperian Chiwere where four Boy Scouts died in a cocain that struck a reconnaissance ranch in June 2008. The National Weather Service said the cocain that impact the 1,800-acre Little Sioux Scout Ranch in the Loess Hills had an estimated twine pace of 145 mph.

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Associated Press illustrator Timberly Ross in Omaha, Neb., contributed to this report


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