the tornado (II)

Fox News received lots of flack for covering the Iowa-Minnesota Storm Cells instead of covering the NASCAR races. Fox News correspondent is quoted as saying, “The storms are a bit more important than a race.” The reports that two children had died in Hugo was inacc urate; it was really one, a two-year-old boy. The little girl is in the hospital and in critical condition, though stable. A couple in our church know the family, and the mother has been released from the hospital, but the husband is still there, recovering from surgery yesterday. The death toll is around eight, I believe, across the path of the storm. Our receptionist, Shelli, passed through one of the neighborhoods that got devastated just ten minutes before it happened (her van is covered with dents from baseball-sized hail); nearly 150 homes are destroyed. Here are a handful of pictures I took of the clouds right after the storm passed us (we could hear the tornado, but it actually struck about a mile away), and a picture taken of the tornado itself crossing, I believe, one of the Lino Lakes.