May 27 2008
The Hand of God
This is a story about the town that was.
Its path of destruction snaked 43 miles long and it touched ground for over one hour. It was one tornado. It was 1.2 miles wide.
In just a few second, hardly more than an eye-blink, the town of Parkersburg, Iowa was obliterated into pieces of confetti. The County Sheriff Jason Johnson said, “This town is not just torn up. It’s gone.”
Foxnews reported today:
Johnson’s home was one of more than 400 damaged here. Another 220 buildings were destroyed including the town’s high school, its sole grocery store and its only gas station. “It’s catastrophic,” Johnson told me as he reflected on the damage. “It’s amazing how much energy this storm had.”
Even more incredible is that there were only four fatalities in Parkersburg and two more in the neighboring town of New Hartford. In a town of roughly two thousand people, four seems like a remarkably small number of people. It looked like the town’s been sandblasted out of existence by Mother Nature.
Unlike China and other areas of the world afflicted with natural disasters where people die in the hundreds and thousands, we have been remarkably blessed.