‘A Completely Different Town Now’: A Community Reels From a Deadly Tornado

Multiple people died in Greenfield, Iowa, population 2,000, where search and rescue efforts were continuing on Wednesday.

Not long after the tornado hit Greenfield, Iowa, residents were already using skid loaders to clear streets. With the hospital damaged, a medical triage center started at the local lumberyard. Paramedics and police officers from across the western half of Iowa were speeding in to help.

“Everybody became little makeshift ambulances,” said Ray Sorensen, a member of the Iowa House of Representatives who lives in Greenfield, and who said he helped with the rescues after racing back into town shortly after the storm hit on Tuesday afternoon. “We pulled a guy from the rubble and put him on a little makeshift stretcher that we made, threw him in the back of a truck.”

On Wednesday, the roughly 2,000 residents of Greenfield began to get a clearer look at the destruction all around. Gov. Kim Reynolds said some areas had been “flattened into debris,” with homes reduced to slabs. Officials said multiple people in town died and more were injured, but had not yet said how many as search and rescue efforts continued. In nearby Adams County, one woman died from storm-related causes, according to the medical examiner.

Around Greenfield, the scenes of destruction began abruptly, with lush green yards transitioning into the chaos of splintered lumber and lawns littered with household items — a cooler, a sink. Outside the local hospital, shredded tree branches were scattered across a lawn and a board had shattered the window of a parked car.

Sarah Wildin, an assistant manager at a gas station, said she was in the basement of her home with her husband, children and parents when the storm hit, causing significant damage to the ground floor.