tornado clean up

What happens when a tornado hits 80,000 chickens? I've been trying to think of a witty, funny answer since this afternoon. So far though nothing has come to mind.

This morning I rode up to the New Hartford, Parkersburg, Iowa area as part of a Mennonite Disaster Service group to help clean up from the E5 tornado which hit about a week and a half ago. We spent the morning cleaning a timber near New Hartford which had the remains of a house or two scattered through all the broken trees and branches. We didn't find much of personal or sentimental value and spent most of the time making piles of burnable items, metal and plastic.

At noon we went to the New Hartford fire station where the Red Cross and local community members fed volunteers. After lunch we went back to the timber but after a phone call, the van I was in was sent over to a farm near Dunkerton. The site consisted of a couple of houses and two large chicken houses. The folks in charge were interested in having us go through the remains of a chicken house which had contained 80,000 caged hens. We were to find and remove as many live chickens as we could.

The not funny answer to the question, what happens when a tornado hits a chicken house is that lots of chickens die, when their cages are smashed. The smell was horrendous but thankfully my sinuses clogged and my sense of smell disappeared. The fifteen of us picked our way through the cages, cutting through the wire cages and extracting chickens which had been without food or water for a week and a half. Most of the chickens seemed grateful to be freed but some made a bit of a fuss when you tried to pull them out. The grossest one for me was when I pulled on a chicken I thought was still alive, only to find it wasn't. Instead it pulled apart and the inside was covered with maggots. There was a live chicken behind it so I reached back in and grabbed while avoiding the maggots.

By 5:00 pm we weren't finding many more live chickens so we tried to clean up a bit and crawled back in our van. We all smelled so we decided to not ruin a restaurant and to just head home.

I thought about taking my camera along but decided not to. We saw a number of foundations sitting empty. All that remained of the house was a debris field with pieces of the house broken into small bits. We drove by a cemetery where almost all the stones had been knocked over, saw a large road grader sitting upside down, numerous smashed cars, ripped up roofs and damaged cars. It was a huge mess and it will take a long while till it is cleaned and even longer until life returns to normal - whatever normal is.

In spite of the stench, the dead chickens, it was overall an enjoyable day, working with some fun guys to try and help some folks.