School children and prison inmates have been helping clean up the mess left behind by a tornado last week in southeast Iowa. The EF2 twister touched down on the night of May 3 and covered a nearly five mile long path through a rural area of Washington and Henry Counties.
Wayland Mayor Brad Roth says hundreds of children from the WACO schools were let out of class for two day to help fill several dump trucks with debris. “We had a couple other local schools send bus loads and they brought some prisoners from Mount Pleasant a couple days,” Roth says.
“We had gobs of volunteers working with them.” Around 10 homes were badly damaged or destroyed by the tornado, but Roth believes everyone is planning to rebuild. No one was injured in the storm.
“It could have been a lot worse,” Roth said. “It just narrowly missed a trailer court and a lot of those people have no place to go in a storm like that.” Two people were buried under debris, but were rescued by firefighters and were not hurt.