GREENFIELD, Iowa (AP) — Authorities in Iowa were continuing search and rescue efforts Wednesday, a day after a deadly tornado slammed the state, devastating the town of Greenfield and killing an undisclosed number of people there.
About 25 miles southwest of Greenfield, a woman died Tuesday when the vehicle she was driving was blown off the road during the storms near Corning, Iowa, the Adams County Sheriff’s office said.
In Greenfield, a town of 2,000 about 55 miles southwest of Des Moines, the tornado left a wide swath of obliterated homes and crumpled cars and had earlier ripped apart and crumpled massive power-producing wind turbines.
“It’s horrific,” Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds said Wednesday at a news conference just outside the devastated town. “It’s hard to describe.”
She and other officials declined to give details of the number of dead and missing in Greenfield, noting that the amount of devastation and debris had made it difficult to be sure of those numbers.
Later Tuesday, the storms moved eastward to pummel parts of Illinois and Wisconsin, knocking out power to tens of thousands of customers in the two states.
The deadly twister that hit Iowa came amid a historically bad season for tornadoes in the U.S. at a time when climate change is heightening the severity of storms around the world. April had the second highest number of tornadoes on record in the U.S.
Through Tuesday, there have been 27% more tornadoes in the country than average. The preliminary count for this year of 859 is the highest since 2017 and is significantly more than the average of 676 through May 21, according to NOAA’s Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma. Nearly 700 of the tornadoes have been in April and May.
Iowa has had the most tornadoes this year with 81, followed by Texas with 74 and Kansas and Ohio each with 66. The National Weather Service said it received 23 tornado reports Tuesday, with most in Iowa — including the one in Greenfield — and one in Wisconsin and Minnesota.
The tornado that leveled Greenfield brought to life the worst case scenario in Iowa that weather forecasters had feared, AccuWeather Chief Meteorologist Jon Porter said.
“Debris was lifted thousands of feet in the air and ended up falling to the ground several counties away from Greenfield. That’s evidence of just how intense and deadly this tornado was,” Porter said.
The deadly tornado appeared to have been on the ground for more than 40 miles, he said, and the damage wrought by it was the worst he had seen since an EF-4 tornado — with wind speeds between 166 and 200 mph — hit Mayfield, Kentucky in December 2021.
A mobile research radar in the area of the Greenfield tornado detected wind speeds higher than 200 mph, which is the threshold for an EF-5 tornado, Porter said.
“But that measurement was taken roughly 600 to 1,000 feet above the ground. It’s the severity of damage on the ground documented during storm damage surveys that dictates the strength of a tornado,” he said.
Greenfield’s hospital was among the buildings that were damaged in the town, which meant that at least a dozen people who were hurt had to be taken to facilities elsewhere, Iowa State Patrol Sgt. Alex Dinkla said Tuesday night. A triage center was set up for the injured at the Greenfield high school. The Adair County Health Department reported that a Methodist Church also was being used to treat the injured.
On Facebook, people as far as 100 miles away from Greenfield posted photos of ripped family photos, check stubs, damp yearbook pages and other items that were lifted into the sky by the Greenfield tornado.
