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 (40 kilometers) 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. The woman’s name and age were not immediately released.
In Greenfield, a town of 2,000 about 55 miles (88.5 kilometers) 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 batter 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 worldwide. April had the second-highest number of tornadoes on record in the U.S.
Through Tuesday, the country has had 27% more tornadoes 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 each in Wisconsin and Minnesota.
