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Marshalltown hospital reopens one week after tornado strike

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July 27th, 2018 by Ric Hanson

(Radio Iowa) — One week after tornado damage forced the evacuation of its patients to other hospitals, Unity Point Health-Marshalltown reopened its main campus this (Friday) morning. Dustin Wright, the hospital’s Vice President of Operations, says it’s been a long week since 43 residents were moved after last Thursday’s powerful twister.

Wright says “It’s taken some adjustments from all of us but we’re here for the community and we did our best with some limited resources but we’re proud of the work we did in the aftermath of the tornado. We’re excited to be back at the main campus again.” It helped that the hospital has a fairly new medical park on the south side of Marshalltown, a building was not affected by the July 19th tornado.

“We had to cancel a few elective procedures on Monday, but for the most part, we’ve been able to sustain a lot of our operations,” Wright says. One of the hospital’s free-standing clinics in the downtown area, a cardiology clinic, was destroyed by the storm. It is being relocated to part of the main downtown campus and is expected to be seeing patients again by the end of next week. U-S Senator Chuck Grassley visited Marshalltown this (Friday) morning and says he anticipates the federal government will move as quickly as it can to provide disaster relief assistance.

“We’re going to do all we can to respond to the mayor’s request,” Grassley says. “When this assessment by FEMA is done, then we want the president to make sure we get a quick designation and get all the help that would normally go to natural disasters.” Grassley said he could tell from what he first saw after the tornado first hit through today that quite a bit of cleanup had already taken place, adding, he knows there is much more work to be done.