JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. — Austin Sayre has to move a dirt-speckled flat screen TV aside so we can get into his second-floor apartment.
It's one of the few items they're trying to salvage after an EF-3 tornado tore apart Jefferson City's Hawthorne Park apartment complex Wednesday night.
"Yeah, this was our living room," Sayer said as sunlight poured in through the wide-open roof. "It's just chaos. There's no other word for it."
Sayre rode out the tornado, "ten seconds of destruction" he called it, in the bathroom with his roommate and their pets. It's the only room that was spared.
Miraculously, nobody died.
An entire wall has fallen from Sayre's apartment. The roof is gone. But the stairs to his unit are usable. That's not the case for all his neighbors.
Some people are accessing their second story apartments by lining ladders up to their windows.
As the sun sets in Jefferson City, work continues. Power and cable companies are running lines. Roofers are patching holes. Tim Otto is clearing tree limbs from his property.
This is the second time in three months that severe weather's hit his house. He needed roofers after strong winds in March.
"I've been pretty blessed throughout my life," Otto said. "I don't know if this is a sign. Maybe I did something, and I got seven years of bad luck."
A few houses down, there's a sign on the front door: "KEEP OUT -- Uninhabitable."
Sayre knows what that is like. He lost almost everything he owns, he will have to stay with friends overnight, and he doesn't have renter's insurance to rebuild his life.
"You went outside and it looked like bombs blew up," Sayre said.