Canton residents recovering after tornado blows through

CANTON, Mo. -- Residents of this Mississippi River town in the northeast corner of Missouri picked up the pieces of their lives Sunday after a tornado blew through Saturday evening.

It damaged a college campus, roughly 50 homes, and businesses including a motel and a grocery store. Five injuries were reported, none of them life-threatening. But it will take the community of about 2,500 residents, located about 150 miles north of St. Louis, time to heal from the damage.

Fire chief Jeff McReynolds said the community received initial warnings of tornadoes at about 5:45 p.m. They first came from Clark County to the north, then from Marion County to the south.

McReynolds said visual spotters saw a funnel cloud in Ewing, a town 20 miles to the south in Lewis County near the Marion County border.

"That's the one that got us," McReynolds said. "I first saw it three miles to the southwest."

It was tracking straight east toward the Mississippi River.

The town sounded sirens about 25 minutes before the tornado came to Canton.

Inside a Comfort Inn just off U.S. 61, a manager knocked door to door trying to warn guests. Then, to speed up the process, the manager asked a maid to light a cigarette right under a smoke detector to set it off.

On Sunday, whole sections of that motel's roof were exposed to their rafters, a Pepsi vending machine visible on the third floor where the hotel's back wall was torn off.

The guests all escaped injury.

Hid in coolers

Just behind the motel, a strip mall is missing huge chunks and a County Market grocery store is crumpled in on itself as though it's made of paper.

Store cashier Beverly Powers, 33, of the neighboring community of LaGrange, described the tense moments when she and a store manager heard a tornado was headed their way.

"I asked if they had a disaster plan, and he said, 'Yeah, go to the back of the coolers,'" she said.

Powers manned the public address system, trying to remain calm and asking customers to go into the cooler. She said she was thinking, "I'm going to die right before Mother's Day."

About 25 customers and store employees took shelter with the milk supply and fresh flowers.

Powers heard calm, then a whoosh. She said people watched through a crack as products lifted off the shelves. The store was destroyed.

She and everyone else escaped.

Powers eventually made her way to her brother's mobile home park. On her way, she passed the roughly 16 blocks of damage.

On Sunday, while there were dozens of snapped trees and downed wires, there were more unusual sights: a boat stuck up against the side of a house; cars parked where garages used to be before they were blown away.

An early estimate is that about 50 houses were damaged, some destroyed.

On the Culver-Stockton College campus, the trademark steel dome from an administrative building lies in a crumple on the lawn. The field-house gymnasium, which had about 1,000 people inside for graduation Saturday morning, now lies in ruins.

The tornado had moved south to north through the center of Canton, skipping the business district on the east end of town.

At the mobile home park Saturday night, Beverly's brother, James Rockhold, 37, his wife and their 6-week-old daughter fled after hearing about the storm on television. Two cars had been flipped over and several mobile homes lie in unrecognizable, heaps of items such as children's bikes, a potted plant and a high chair strewn about.

Canton is working to restore electricity, phone service and help people find housing, said Mayor Terry Fretwell.

Rockhold tallied what was missing.

"All the furniture, the fridge. I haven't even found the bed yet. The sink is way over there. It's gone. It's all gone," he said.

But he added, "Everyone's safe. It's a new day."