"Mainly it's just a cleanup effort right now by numerous volunteers, people coming from all over to help out,” said Monona County Sheriff Jeff Pratt.

“Kind of like a dust storm, kind of,” said resident Crystal Young.” Huge, huge.

In its wake was steel wrapped in trees and brick and mortar scattered like Legos. “When I came into town it was just unreal, I mean it takes your breath away,” said Dow City/Arion firefighter/EMS Holly Gorden.

“It's just like I said, they're lucky. But we do that, that's what we do. We help people. We come from all over when you hear something and you just go."

"I can't believe we're alive,” said Young. “That's all that matters. And my babies weren't there, so I'm thankful."

Across the road, the huge garage that kept semis protected wound up on Crystal's house just after they got down to the basement. "We thought the house was caving in on us and I thought the whole house was coming down and we heard the windows shatter."

She walked over to what used to be a shed to show how they got back out. "We crawled through there."

It's too dangerous to go inside and see what can be salvaged, but anything that can be saved at a mobile home was easy to see with the walls ripped away. The owner wasn't in town at the time.

Then there's the story of the woman who didn't feel safe in her mobile home so she ran outside looking for cover elsewhere. She made it as far as what used to be a foot bridge. She hid underneath it holding onto a pole as the tornado passed overhead.

A crawl space was where Deanna Shupe found safe haven with her eight children, ages 2 to 14.

"Oh, it was chaos," she said. "They were crying. Their ears were hurting because of the pressure, the suction pressure."

Their family business and adjoining apartment were gone when they climbed back out. Her husband, Jeff, was in the thick of it as the winds were ripping the building apart. He couldn't find a flashlight to find his way down to the rest of his family.

Somehow, he and the rest of the town's nearly 1300 residents, managed to make it out of the devastation without serious injury.

The whole thing lasted only about two-minutes, but Shupe said it felt like an eternity. “We just know God has a plan," she said. "We don't know what it is, but we know he has a plan and he will, he will take care of it. That's all I have to hold onto right now."