Grassley gets close look at tornado

NEW HARTFORD, Iowa — Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) didn’t know he was watching the most powerful tornado to hit Iowa in 32 years when he saw a huge dark wedge-shaped cloud pass less than two miles from his farm on the afternoon of May 25.

“It didn’t have a funnel shape, so I didn’t know it was a tornado until I turned on the TV,” Grassley said Saturday as he surveyed the hellish aftermath of the deadly twister that ripped through northeastern Iowa and leveled half of nearby Parkersburg while killing seven people, including two in New Hartford.

{mosads}As Grassley viewed the cataclysmic damage caused by the giant tornado that stretched three-quarters of a mile wide with winds up to 205 miles per hour, he spoke to owners of several of the more than 500 homes and business that were destroyed or damaged. Some were picking through the ruins while Iowa National Guardsmen who had been in Iraq a year ago helped disaster relief and law enforcement officials and other volunteers begin the massive cleanup effort.

None of the many stories that Grassley heard was more powerful or poignant than that of Rusty and Julie Eddy, a young Parkersburg couple who stopped their pickup truck to greet him. They had left their two small children in their newly built home with Julie’s parents while on a weekend canoe trip in northern Iowa, when a co-worker reached her on her cell phone.

“She was hysterical because she thought we were at home, and she asked me if we were all right,” she told Grassley. “I said, ‘What do you mean?’ She said, ‘Parkersburg has been destroyed and your house has disappeared,’ and then the phone went dead.”

Mrs. Eddy frantically tried to reach her parents but was unable to, so the couple flagged down a car at the riverbank and got their own car and began driving to Parkersburg. “For 45 minutes, we thought they were dead, and then about halfway home, we finally got through to my mother and she said they had survived the storm and were safe at her house, which didn’t get hit.”

“We were really relieved,” said Rusty Eddy, a social worker who has lived in Parkersburg all his life. “We realized we wouldn’t have to start a family again.”

Grassley, who visited the site with Iowa Gov. Chet Culver (D) the day after the tornado struck, knew many of the people whose homes and businesses were destroyed. He said it is difficult to comprehend or describe the magnitude and violent impact of the tornado, which toppled granite headstones in New Hartford’s cemetery and tore apart huge grain storage bins, scattering their jagged metal remains across the landscape.

The 74-year-old Grassley was wearing a tracksuit he’d changed into after finishing a 5k race in nearby Waterloo and treating a reporter to breakfast at a Waterloo restaurant, where tornado victims continuously approached him to tell about their experiences.

Grassley is a familiar face throughout Iowa, especially in the area surrounding New Hartford, where his son runs the 700-acre family farm. He isn’t hard to find, since his license plate reads “GRASSLY.”

As he left Parkersburg to return to his farmstead about a mile south of New Hartford, Grassley confessed that he may have made a potentially dangerous mistake by failing to take cover as he watched the tornado from an upstairs window of his house.

“I should have gone to the basement because it hit so quickly and was so powerful,” he said.