Scouts' training helped on night of terror; 4 killed, 48 injured in Iowa twister

BLENCOE, Iowa — Just before the tornado hit, the Boy Scouts were gathering on the porch of a shelter, playing cards and waiting out what many thought was a pelting rain. In moments, a Scout leader, hearing a faint tornado siren, hurried them inside, and then, as he saw the twister in the distance, ordered them to dive under tables, survivors said.

The door, still open, tore off and vanished. The ceiling flapped open on one side, then the other, and caved in. The walls began disappearing. The pickup parked out front flew into the air. The huge stone chimney collapsed, crushing some boys, according to others who had crouched near them.

"I was just laying there in the fetal position, my hands over my head, trying to imagine that I wasn't really there, that this wasn't really happening, that it was a dream," said Cody VanZuiden, 13, who was among the survivors.

The tornado killed four boys and injured 48 others on Wednesday night at a remote camp near Blencoe, where nearly 100 boys from Iowa, Nebraska and South Dakota had gathered for a leadership-training week known as Pahuk Pride.

Some told of a deafening howl that ended after about eight seconds, leaving behind a chaotic scene for which no drills, indeed nothing, could have prepared them: screaming, howling boys buried beneath rubble, wood and stones; a desperate search to get help when it turned out that the ranger's home, too, had blown away; and rescue teams struggling with bulldozers, tractors and chain saws to get into the camp on unpaved roads where enormous trees had fallen all around.

"When I got up," VanZuiden said, "there was a boy right in front of me, face down, in a pool of blood. I had never seen that before."

Through it all, survivors and their families said, there were moments of surprising strength: Scouts who held makeshift tourniquets (their Scout shirts, mainly) on those who were bleeding while they waited for rescue crews; a Scout who gave mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a gravely wounded boy, and another who did chest compressions on a second boy; Scouts who began digging out rocks with their hands to uncover the buried.

"It's the Scouts that saved a lot of lives," said Ed Osius, chief of the volunteer fire department in Blencoe, a town of about 200, not far from the Little Sioux Scout Ranch, with its rugged, heavily wooded terrain, trails and valleys spread over 1,800 acres.

"The Scouts did exactly what they were trained to do. This was the real thing."

"There were some real heroes at this Scout camp," Gov. Chet Culver said Thursday, adding that he thinks the Scouts saved lives while they waited for paramedics to cut through the trees and reach the camp a mile into the woods.

After the tornado hit, after 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, parents from three states found themselves in a desperate waiting game that stretched on, in many cases, for hours.

Some saw reports of the twister on television and began driving toward the camp, only to be forced to turn back because of more tornadoes, flooding and other ominous weather along their routes.

Others said they arrived at the camp not long after the storm struck but did not learn until nearly midnight whether their children were alive.

"The hardest thing was just sitting there and not knowing," said Chris Karschner, who raced from her home in Omaha, Neb., and waited, she said, for many painful hours to be reunited with her son Ben, 14. "They just couldn't get the children out of there, through all the trees and rubble, and they couldn't tell us anything."

For the parents of four boys, ages 13 and 14, the news, when it did come, was no relief. In Omaha on Thursday night, hundreds gathered, many of them in Scout uniforms, for a somber candlelight vigil to remember the four: Aaron Eilerts, 14, of Eagle Grove, Iowa; and Josh Fennen, 13; Sam Thomsen, 13; and Ben Petrzilka, 14, all of Omaha — all of whom had been selected as leaders in their local troop and, as such, been invited to attend the special weeklong training.

One of the four will be buried in his Scouting uniform, Boy Scout officials said, another with the Scouting emblem on his casket.

Among officials and the survivors, eight of whom remained hospitalized late Thursday, there remained confusion about how much warning had been given before the tornado struck.

Many boys said they knew nothing of it until their leader said he heard a siren just before the tornado touched down.

Culver would not address questions about whether the Scouts should have remained at the campground after severe-weather alerts were issued.

"There's always lessons learned from any natural disaster, from any tragedy," Culver said. "We need to focus on the victims, the families affected."

The National Weather Service said the tornado was an EF3 on the 1-to-5 Enhanced Fujita scale of tornado intensity, with an estimated wind speed of 145 mph. The twister cut a path estimated at 14 miles long.

Lloyd Roitstein, an executive with the Mid-America Council of the Boy Scouts of America, said camp leaders had plenty of warning and provided all the needed notice: Scout leaders in an administration building on the grounds had a weather radio and set off a siren at that building before the tornado arrived; he could not provide specific times.

The 93 boys and about 25 staff members did exactly as they should have, Roitstein said. The group split into two, and headed for two shelters that sit in a low valley.

Neither of the shelters in the camp, owned since 1970 by the Scouts, had basements. One shelter survived; one, to the north, was destroyed.

"You have to understand, there's not much that would have survived this tornado," Roitstein said. "The entire valley was like it was put through a blender."

As the Scouts headed into the northern building, they said they recalled their leaders shushing them, saying they might have heard sirens.

"That's when I saw the tornado in the distance," said Ben Karschner, 14, who said he flung himself under a table and grabbed the table leg. Windows smashed. Dust flew. The odor of dirt and water filled his nose, Karschner said.

"I just kept thinking, I want to live," he recalled. "It felt like an hour and a half, like forever."

Other Scouts said they prayed. One recorded a goodbye message on his camera. Another said he could not think, could not hear; he could see only a bright, white light: a tumble of debris and rushing air.

Charles Bowerman, 16, remembered diving under a table, watching chairs fly. Then the force of the tornado pushed him across the concrete floor, passed where a wall once stood, and out on to the grass.

"I was going to the Lord's side, and I was going to go there flying," recalled Bowerman, who was wearing a splint on his wrist. "It felt like I was about to be lifted up. I just hugged the ground as much as I could."

Material from The Associated Press is included in this report.