Evansville, November 6 - Steps lead to nowhere. Concrete foundations stand bare. Stop signs bend parallel to the ground.
But right next to obliterated houses stands a home hardly touched at all.
The tangled aftermath of a tornado that killed at least 22 people in southwest Indiana, the storm's hit-or-miss nature and the eerie calm that fills the air are the familiar calling cards of one of Earth's most violent atmospheric phenomena.
Winds of at least 150 mph - and possibly far higher - cut a path through the Eastbrook Mobile Home Park in Evansville on Sunday, leaving behind shattered bodies mixed with pieces of their lives.
Splintered trees were filled with a tangled mess of insulation and aluminum siding as survivors cried out for help or wandered in the pre-dawn blackness across lawns and streets filled with shattered glass, doors, mattresses, furniture and clothing.
Rescuers who arrived on the scene shortly after the storm found children looking for their parents and parents searching for their children. After finding several bodies in the debris, firefighters were elated to find a child alive but trapped beneath part of a mobile home.
Clifford and Marcella Rawlings said they were asleep and didn't hear the wail of tornado sirens warning of the storm as it approached about 2 a.m. CST.
In an instant, the balmy autumn night turned into a nightmare, they said, as the tornado roared by in the darkness, buffeting the Rawlings' mobile home.
"It just seemed like we jumped two feet in the bed. We thought it was an earthquake," said Marcella Rawlings.
When the storm passed, many of the Rawlings' neighbors were dead, their homes shattered. But the couple's trailer home suffered so little damage they expected to sleep there again Sunday.
Gov. Mitch Daniels, who surveyed the storm damage in Vanderburgh County and adjoining Warrick County by helicopter, said the tornado appeared to have bounced about as it cut across the landscape, sparing some homes and businesses while erasing others next door.
"In the cruel and unfathomable ways of mother nature there's incredible devastation next to apparently unscathed properties," he said.
Marsha Tweedy broke into tears Sunday at sunset as she walked through the remains of the farm house where her 28-year-old daughter, Cheryl Warren, died.
She and her family drove toward Warren's home after hearing the tornado had hit Degonia Springs in Warrick County. They found the roads blocked by authorities and later learned the storm had killed Warren - a dental assistant who was eight months pregnant - her 4-year-old son, Isaac, and her husband, Jeremy, a truck driver.
"They were a beautiful family," Tweedy said. "They didn't have much, but they enjoyed everything they had."
In the city of Newburgh a few miles to east of Evansville's devastated mobile home park, Patty Ellerbusch, 53, and her husband, David, were in bed when a relative called and warned that a tornado was on the ground.
Just as they turned on the television to check for a weather alert, they heard an ominous roaring sound and ran for their basement.
Patty made it downstairs, but her 56-year-old husband was still in a hallway when the tornado shredded their one-story ranch-style home. He was blasted with shattered drywall, wood and other debris but suffered only some bruises.
"He was running down the hallway and it knocked him down and ripped his glasses off. He said it felt like being in a wind tunnel," she said.
Although their home was heavily damaged, their barn gone and the wooded landscape around them devastated, the couple said they were thankful they and their three college-age children, who were not home, were unharmed.
"We can replace stuff, but our lives, we can't," she said.
(Copyright 2005 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
Tornado destroys and spares | wthr.com
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