Parkersburg Tornados Pt. 1

PARKERSBURG, IOWA -- MAY 26, 2008

As many of you know, Parkersburg, IA was hit by a terrible tornado on Sunday, May 25, 2008. This small town of approximately 1,600 people was where Ken lived from February-May 2008 when he returned to Iowa to work and while I was in Illinois finishing school. During this time, he lived at his sister Kathy's house which she was selling. The house was a lovely 1970's split foyer house with an attached garage. When you walked in the front door, you would either go up 5 steps to the main level or down 5 steps to the sub-level basement. The house was quite large: 3 bedrooms, 3 full baths, a newly remodeled kitchen and remodeled two bathrooms, and a large open living room with a fireplace. (I don't have a "before picture" of the house to share right now.) I also lived here from May 11-May 23 after I returned from IL and before just last weekend when we moved out of it and to Waterloo which is only about 20-25 miles away. (You can click on any of the pictures to enlarge them.)

HOUSE
The picture to the left shows what is left of this house after the tornado Sunday night. What you are looking at is the driveway leading to the 2-stall garage which was attached to the house. To the right you can see some of the brick archway that led to a small attached workspace / storeroom. This was about the only part of the house that is left. The rubble you see before you is the top half of the house which was torn off the sub-level. The tree you see sitting to the left in the picture was ripped from her backyard and is actually sitting on the whole house (living room and bedrooms). You can see the neghbor's house to the far left in the picture so you know where her house would have ended.

After surveying the house, we all agreed that no one would have survived if they'd been in it at the time of the storm. There just was no safe place to be. Too much of the basement of the house was covered in debris, and where it wasn't covered, the top of the house had been ripped off. We were very blessed that no one was living in the house at the time and all of Kathy's, Ken's and my belongings had been moved out. The house was, for the most part, empty and so we did not lose as much as others in town.

This picture of the back of the house shows a better picture of how the top of was ripped off. All that remains is the brick-covered sub-level basement. Here the garage was to the left of the sidewalk and the rest of the house would have been on the right. The small patch of concrete in the center of the picture was where a little playhouse stood. It was kind of a smaller scale version of the bigger house. There is no sign of it left and we couldn't find any of it. It's as though the whole thing was picked up and dropped somewhere else. All we found was a few pieces of a weather vane that sat on top of it.

Here is another shot of the back of the house. The window with the green paint was the laundry room and the cats' litter box and eating room. Here you can also see where the tree was that is now lying on top of the house. Interestingly, all the landscaping around the house, trees, and playhouse still looked pretty good. The tree didn't even have stump left on it; just sharp pieces of it sticking out of the ground.



This is just a shot of part of the devastation of the town. This is the Parkersburg water tower and a shot, I believe, of what was the new bank. One of the things we noticed was that the trees have no leaves and many of them have no bark on them anymore. What was once a beautiful city filled with lush green trees looks like the dead of winter.
I'll post more pictures of the town and the people we helped in a second blog posting.