You go ahead and live there... I will take the earthquakes...

Tornado-spawning storms left multiple people dead in Iowa and now threaten cities from Texas to Vermont

By Elizabeth Wolfe, Robert Shackelford and Joe Sutton

Some Iowa communities are waking up Wednesday to sift through the rubble of now-unrecognizable homes and mourn the deaths of neighbors who were killed by a series of tornado-spawning storms that tore through the Midwest Tuesday and now threaten a much broader swath of the US.

Multiple fatalities and some injuries have been reported in the small city of Greenfield, Iowa – about 50 miles southwest of Des Moines – after a tornado carved a devastating path through the community Tuesday evening, Iowa State Patrol spokesperson Sgt. Alex Dinkla told CNN. Dinkla did not elaborate on the number or nature of the deaths.

“There is basically nothing left,” Clel Baudler, a former Iowa state representative who lives a half mile from Greenfield, told CNN on Tuesday. Video taken by CNN affiliate KCCI shows homes and other structures have been obliterated and the community is blanketed with heaps of debris, tossed cars and uprooted trees.

Valerie Warrior, a Greenfield resident, pleaded with God to protect her home and her family before she rode out the storm in her basement, she told KCCI.

“I was in the furnace room and then I heard (the storm) like a train,” she said, describing insulation flying off of basement windows. “I heard it, and I knew it was hitting.”

Warrior said the scale of damage is devastating to see, but she is confident residents will pull each other through the crisis.

“They’ll get through it. You already see people out helping each other, working together. And that’s what they do, people come together when a tragedy happens. People come together to support and encourage each other.”

Fighting back tears, Warrior looked out the rubble strewn across her neighborhood and tried to crack a smile.

“We’ll rebuild,” she said. “We’ll rebuild.”

At least 18 tornadoes were reported in Iowa Tuesday – part of a torrent of storms that have left widespread power outages, structural damage and flooding across the US this week.

Tornado reports have skyrocketed well-above average in recent weeks as the typically busiest period of severe weather season unfolds. The more than 800 tornadoes reported so far this year make it one of the most active years for twisters on record.

More than 90,000 homes and businesses are in the dark across Iowa, Wisconsin and Illinois as of Wednesday morning, according to PowerOutage.us. More outages are anticipated as storms roll through the East.

Wednesday’s severe thunderstorm threat is slightly less intense than Tuesday’s, but dangerous storms remain possible. Damaging winds, hail and some tornadoes could occur along a sprawling 1,500-mile expanse from Texas to western Vermont.

Energetic storms rumbled to life Wednesday morning in parts of Oklahoma. Additional thunderstorms will fire up throughout the day and likely reach peak in strength in parts of the southern Plains and Mississippi Valley during the afternoon and evening.

Severe storms are also likely to fire up from the Ohio Valley through the Northeast Wednesday afternoon. These storms could be slightly less organized and widespread than those in the South, but damaging wind gusts and hail are possible. The tornado threat is very limited in this area.

Cities including Nashville and Memphis, Tennessee, St. Louis, Memphis, Cleveland, Tulsa and Columbus, Ohio, should be storm-aware.

Some Iowa neighborhoods left in ruins

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds issued a disaster emergency proclamation Tuesday for 15 counties as a potent line of thunderstorms tore through the state.

Western Iowa bore the brunt of the storms’ catastrophic impacts. A tornado flattened buildings in Greenfield, toppled a hulking wind turbine in Prescott and reduced several people’s homes to mountains of jagged debris.

In addition to the fatalities reported in Greenfield, at least one other person was killed as storms passed through nearby Adams County, local officials said.

More than two dozen homes were damaged or destroyed in Montgomery County, including some “critical public facilities,” emergency management officials said. No injuries have been reported but damage assessments are still ongoing.