The house would have provided shade on the dirt road had it not been for the tornado that ripped the top story off two days before. I didn't know what to think.

As we walked on May 24, Jessica Vrettos, Shannon Farrell and I had seen a few smaller things that told the tale of the storms that devastated northern Colorado May 22: mangled irrigation sprayers turned over with their wheels in the air, huge swaths of destroyed crop land and uprooted trees.