Suddenly the winds blew hard and hail broke his windshield. A sign said 1 mile to Greensburg.
He pulled under the convenience store awning for cover, looked over and saw two elderly women huddled in a car. He held his hands up as if to say to them, “What’s going on?”
He hurried into the store, where a clerk told him a storm was headed right at Greensburg.
As he ushered the older women out of their car and into the store he looked for the best shelter.
He found a walk-in cooler and he told himself that would be the most sturdy place. As he and about 10 other people took refuge there, he kept kicking the door open, fearing it would shut, locking them in. Suddenly his ears popped and the door slammed shut.
The wind roared then it got quiet. Then it got the loudest.
“The cooler saved our lives,” Stauner said the next morning when the light revealed that the cooler had all but collapsed.
Drako rode out the storm in the floorboard of the truck.
Thinking about the night before Stauner said, “I’m telling you man, you would not believe it, you would not believe it.”
His camper shell had exploded and some of his belongings apparently blew away. But a prized custom guitar remained in its case, dry, unscathed.
Around 7:30 Saturday morning, about 21 Wichita and Sedgwick County firefighters were waiting by their trucks outside the convenience store — waiting to search house-to-house for bodies or survivors.
At one point, several of them who were gathered around one truck realized that they had been standing in what looked like blood, smeared across the pavement. They carefully stepped around it.
Minutes later they broke into teams and went street-by-street, climbing over debris that bristled with exposed nails.
There were so many house-sized heaps of debris, one firefighter said, “I don’t know where to start.”
http://www.kansas.com/197/story/62572.html
One comforting piece of information in the link you posted was the statement from a Greensburg resident that they had about 20 minutes of tornado sirens before the tornado actually hit. I’ll bet that saved many lives.