HOLLY - A deadly tornado that crushed this town on the eastern plains surprised forecasters by doubling back from Kansas and carving a 600-foot-wide swath of destruction.

Months ahead of Colorado's typical tornado season and without warning to the 1,000 or so people who live here, the funnel cloud hit like a bomb at 7:57 p.m. Wednesday, leaving a town in splinters and killing a young mother.

It was the state's first tornado fatality in 47 years.

Residents of Holly cleared debris and picked through rubble Thursday in search of scattered pieces of their lives: family photos, a wedding ring.

At least five homes were destroyed, and virtually every building in town sustained damage, county administrator Linda Fairbairn said.

"The kitchen is gone, the garage is gone, the patio roof, the trees are all uprooted," Kathryn McCracken said as she sifted through broken windows, scattered bricks and china. "I managed to save a few pictures."

A tornado watch was in effect for extreme western Kansas but not for extreme eastern Colorado when the tornado slammed into Holly, four miles west of the state line.

The National Weather Service in Pueblo decided against a tornado watch for Colorado because the "dry line" - dividing the dry air on the west from the moist air on the east - had already moved across the border into Kansas, said Paul Wolyn, a weather service meteorologist.

"We were expecting it to remain in Kansas," Wolyn said.

Forecasters had followed the storm all day and watched it moving east. They hadn't seen any tornadoes, nor had any been reported, before the "dry line" crossed the state line in the early evening.

There was no time to sound Holly's tornado siren.

"They were essentially issuing the warning as it occurred," said Chris Sorensen, a Kiowa County Emergency Management official serving as public information officer in Holly on Thursday.

Killer storms

Jackie and Dennis Simmons were a few miles east of town when they saw the storm move swiftly across the horizon.

"It looked like it was sucking up all of Holly," Jackie Simmons said. "We thought maybe it just looked so big because it was nighttime and we were scared. But it was really big."

The National Weather Service reported 65 tornadoes across five Plains states on Wednesday. The twisters killed at least four people, including Rosemary Rosales, of Holly, who was pulled from her kitchen to her death.

Her husband, Gustavo Puga, and 3-year-old daughter, Noelia, are in serious condition at Memorial Hospital in Colorado Springs. At least seven other people were injured.

The last Colorado tornado to take a life struck near Holyoke in the northeastern part of the state, where it killed a farmer and a visitor from Kansas.

'Like a bomb went off'

Wednesday's tornado killed dozens of cattle and injured others so severely they will have to be shot, said rancher Bill Lowe, who lost about 35 of the 800 cattle in his feedlot.

"It just looks like a bomb went off," he said. "It's just too much."

Roy Burns saw the storm as he drove to his 76-year-old mother's house. He found her buried in wreckage.

"I pulled the oven off of her. I put her on a closet door and put her in the back seat of my pickup and hauled her to the ambulance," he said.

Delores Burns was transported into Lamar and then flown by Flight for Life to Parkview Hospital in Pueblo, where she was resting Thursday with two broken shoulders and several broken ribs.

Like Burns, many of Holly's townspeople had been up all night searching for relatives and friends and getting the injured to hospitals.

The twister churned a five- block-wide path up the center of town, from the south end to the north, grinding up trees, cars and houses.

Hundred-year-old elms in the town's Gateway Park were stripped bare of branches or uprooted and tossed on their sides.

Block-long rows of mud-spattered houses were a shambles of broken windows, missing entire sides and roofs. Cars, trucks and campers lay wheels-up in yards amid piles of debris.

A second blow

Gov. Bill Ritter arrived about 1:15 p.m. Thursday and flew over the area by helicopter. Then he walked through the town to console residents who were cleaning up.

"It's numbing," Ritter said.

No damage estimate was made Thursday. A team from the Federal Emergency Management Agency arrived at midafternoon.

The team will join inspectors from the state and the Small Business Administration today to assess the damage.

FEMA spokesman Art Storey expects to produce damage estimates by this afternoon and could send them to Washington within 48 hours for a decision on disaster-declaration financial aid.

The tornado was another bitter blow to the town, which struggled only a few months ago with blizzards that caused major livestock losses.

But Ritter praised the resolve of the region's residents.

"If you go out there and watch them about their business of cleaning up, you realize these are hearty souls. They'll be back on their feet," he said.

fosterd@RockyMountainNews.com or 719-633-4442.

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