Iowa City neighborhoods recovering five years after devastating tornado

IOWA CITY - Jason Prantner wasn't sure what had fallen on his car - he thought maybe the apartment building he parked near - until he reached out the window and touched a tree.

“I felt like the front of the car might have been lifting off the ground when the tree hit, and I did think I was in big trouble when that was happening,” he said.

It was five years ago April 13 when a tornado tore a 4.5-mile path of destruction through Iowa City.

Prantner was a University of Iowa student at the time and had just returned to his car on Iowa Avenue after taking a test. It took him a few tries before he was able to get through the driver's side window of his crushed Mazda 626.

Amazingly, he escaped unharmed, with the tree landing on the car just behind his head. He's now 34 and a graduate student in chemistry at the University of Washington.

Iowa City as a whole had a similar story: lots of property damage but little in the way of personal injury, despite near misses.

About 30 people were injured, none seriously, by the F2-rated tornado, with 155 mph winds, that struck Iowa City at about 8:30 p.m.

The storm that spawned the tornado was deadly, though. Fifteen tornadoes touched down in Eastern Iowa and western Illinois that night, including one in rural Nichols about 20 miles southeast of Iowa City that killed 49-year-old Christine McAtee.

The Iowa City tornado received most of the attention and made national news, probably because it was the rare twister that struck inside a metropolitan area.

“It's just the odds, just obviously more rural ground out there, percentage wise,” State Climatologist Harry Hillaker said on why tornadoes don't often hit towns.

He said the Iowa City tornado was stronger than up to 95 percent of tornadoes.

The Iowa City tornado caused about $15 million in damage, according to local and federal officials. It started on the southwest side of town and headed northeast, passing through neighborhoods that are home to a lot of college students. Thursday night is a popular night for students to go to bars, and emergency officials speculated that helped prevent injuries.

Walls and ceilings were ripped from buildings. Cars were thrown or crushed where they sat. Debris was everywhere.

“The thing that stood out is how intense the damage was in such a narrow band in the path of the tornado versus the more broad damages associated with straight-line winds or flooding,” said Iowa City Public Works Director Rick Fosse.

Perhaps nothing symbolized that destruction more than St. Patrick's Catholic Church.

The tornado struck on the Thursday before Easter, and a few dozen people were at the church praying the rosary after Holy Thursday Mass. After tornado sirens went off, the Rev. Rudy Juarez led a group of about 50 people to the basement of the rectory next door on Church Street south of downtown.

When the tornado passed overhead, the building felt like it was being lifted up and there was the sound of things crashing above, Juarez recently recalled.

When it was over, a parishioner looked outside and told Juarez he needed to come see. Juarez was expecting a broken window or two on the 130-year-old church.

“I could see sky, and I thought, wait a minute, I'm looking right through the roof of the church,” he said. “And so I thought, wow, that's really something. And then I looked again, and there was no steeple and there was no front wall or back wall to the church.”

Juarez is convinced that if they had not sought shelter, there would have been deaths. And yet no one was hurt.

The building was a loss and the parish relocated to the east side of town with a new church at 4330 St. Patrick's Dr. About 1,100 families worship there, and the daily Mass chapel has pews, ceiling lamps, bricks, stained glass windows and the altar from the old church.

A group of people also took cover at Hotel Vetro on the Pedestrian Mall. Employees Marion Stern, an Iowa City West High School graduate and a UI student at the time, and Ben Nielsen ushered about 150 people to the basement parking garage.

The stairs were closed because of construction, so they had to take an elevator, said Stern, now 26. She said she remained calm because she was in “work mode,” but it was a scary situation for others.

“There was some guy freaking out and shaking and grabbing my arm and I was like, ‘You need to calm down. We're going to get through this,'” she said.

The group rode out the storm and Stern and Nielsen were later honored as heroes by then-Gov. Tom Vilsack.

“Looks great on my resume,” joked Stern, now an attorney in Kansas.

The state did not receive a presidential disaster declaration, but the city's efforts on that front weren't for nothing. Fosse, the public works director, said when the flood hit in 2008, city officials were well versed in the complex paperwork required by the federal government.

Prantner, meanwhile, took a hit on his car. He had only liability insurance on it and wasn't going to spend the money to repair it, so when the city called to tell him he could pick it up, he passed.

“They towed it and it's probably a cube now or something,” he said.