Wisconsin and Oklahoma tornadoes leave 2 dead

PRAIRIE LAKE, Wis. — Barron County Sheriff Chris Fitzgerald couldn't help wondering how much worse it could have been.

Late Tuesday afternoon he walked through the remains of a mobile home park leveled by a tornado that killed one resident and injured two dozen more.

"It’s a miracle that nobody else was injured," Fitzgerald said. "You can see that by the devastation.”

Fitzgerald said he was prepared for the worst when he encountered the scene, the most devastating storm damage he's seen in 20 years of law enforcement.

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“It was the worst. I just thought, man, we’re going to be digging for people for days,” Fitzgerald said, considering the storm struck Tuesday around 5:30 p.m. when kids were home from school and people gathered for dinner.

Killed was Eric Gavin, 45, who was found outside his destroyed trailer at the Prairie Lake Estate Mobile Park on state Highway 53 about 40 miles north of Eau Claire.

Authorities haven't determined whether he was inside his trailer and thrown out or was already outside when the storm struck.

In Oklahoma, another tornado damaged much of a subdivision on the southern fringe of Elk City. Fire Chaplain Danny Ringer told reporters at the scene late Tuesday that one person was known dead from the twister, although details were lacking.

The twisters were among up to 29 that were reportedly spawned by powerful storms that raced through a swath of the central U.S. stretching from Texas to the Great Lakes on Tuesday evening, destroying dozens of homes, killing two people and injuring dozens of others.

The tornadoes, some of them still unverified a day later, touched down in five states: Wisconsin and Oklahoma, which each had one death and about 40 homes destroyed, and Texas, Kansas and Nebraska. The governors of Wisconsin and Oklahoma toured the destruction in their states Wednesday, and residents were allowed to sift through the wreckage.

In Elk City, a community of about 13,000 people roughly 110 miles west of Oklahoma City, the neighborhood buzzed Wednesday with chain saws, generators and a visit from Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin, who called the damage “devastating.”

In Wisconsin, Fitzgerald estimated 12 to 15 of the 58 homes in the park where Gavin was killed were destroyed. It will probably be a week before residents can return home.

Two law enforcement officers suffered minor injuries when helping to locate people.

“They had to lift walls — people were trapped, and other residents who were OK were running and telling us, someone is in that trailer, we just don’t know where,” Fitzgerald said.

National Weather Service officials from the Twin Cities who assessed the damage confirmed it was a tornado, though the EF classification might not be issued until Thursday.

"It appears at this time to be a pretty long-track tornado," said National Weather Service lead forecaster Bill Borghoff, adding that damage extended east across Rusk County.

After surveying the tornado damage, Gov. Scott Walker declared a state of emergency for three counties hit by the tornado and thunderstorms that dropped as much as 5 inches of rain, damaging roads and other infrastructure: Barron, Jackson and Rusk.

Ronald Blomberg, 27, and his fiancée, Rissa Rhoades, 23, lived next door to Gavin's trailer. They said he had lived there about six months.

Blomberg described Gavin as “very charismatic, very kind. He’d do anything he could for you within his means. It’s very tragic.”

Gavin was a truck driver for a nearby turkey farm where Blomberg also works, and was probably getting ready to head off to his shift when the tornado hit, Blomberg said. Blomberg and his fiancée left home about 10 minutes before the tornado hit, heading south to Chetek.

“If me and my fiancée would have stayed 10 minutes more, we would have gotten hit," he said. "I got a phone call from my old man and he said, 'Ronny, you gotta get out of there. You gotta get out of there.' And you know I kind of blew it off, because I’ve been in severe weather before and I didn’t think it was going to be this bad.”

When Blomberg returned, an officer stopped him — the officer had found a picture of him and his fiancée in the destruction and asked if it was him. “It’s the only thing we have left of our home,” he said of the picture.

He hopes he can find their wedding bands, including an engagement ring that belonged to Rhoades' great-grandmother. He also hoped to find their cats, which he described as their kids.

"I look at it with a heavy heart,” Blomberg said, gazing out over the destruction. “I’m grateful that me and my fiancée got out, because we could have been right there with our next door neighbor, Eric, and he was a great guy. He was a great man.”

Contributing: Meg Jones, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and The Associated Press. Follow Chelsey Lewis on Twitter: @chelseylew