(Radio Iowa) – A prayer service was held in Greenfield Wednesday afternoon to mark the minute it took for a powerful tornado to rip through the community. Four people were killed. Over 200 homes and about 30 businesses were destroyed or heavily damaged. Greenfield Chamber of Commerce director Stacie Eshelman says some people lost their business AND their home. “I think the mental toll of all of this is what’s the hardest to overcome,” she said. Eshelman’s house was among those hit.

“I still had some walls standing, but the east side of my house was completely destroyed and it was just enough damage that the rest of it had to be torn down,” Eshelman said. About 100 building permits for new homes have been filed in the year since the disaster. “We feel like that’s a great accomplishment, but at the same time we have a long way to go to be fully back to where we were,” Eshelman said, “and we already had a shortage.”

Greenfield’s hospital — the only hospital in Adair County — was critically damaged and patients were evacuated. The hospital reopened six months later. “We had just so many small businesses that had to completely rebuild everything that they had built over the years,” Eshelman says. Eshelman says rebuilding is only part of the recovery. “This is a little bigger than a lot of us have ever had to deal with,” Eshelman says. “…It was really important just to bring people to together so they could share what they’d been through, if they wanted to, and talk that out either with people who had had a similar experience or people that were maybe not in the area but were just absolutely there to support us and lift us up.”

None of the five churches in Greenfield were damaged by the tornado. “They really became the place where people could come together and get support,” Eshelman says, “and they’re still doing that a year later.” The Catholic church in Greenfield hosted a breakfast yesterday (Wednesday), the Lutheran church hosted a lunch and all the church bells in Greenfield were rung 60 times Wednesday afternoon to represent the 60 seconds it took for the tornado to pass through the community. That was followed by a moment of silence. “Just to remember the loss of the four people we lost in our community,” Eshelman said, “but also for the people that suffered so much that day.”

Wind speeds in the Greenfield tornado reached 185 miles an hour. It first touched down in Page County, then stayed on the ground for nearly 44 miles, causing an estimated 31 MILLION dollars in damage.