flooding. eight to 11 inches of rain drenched the area. officials say the floods swept some victims bodies up to five miles downstream. a painful and all too familiar process is just beginning for the latest tornado survivors, the search, the cleanup, and the early tally of how much was lost. here s cnn s renee marsh. reporter: wolf, the task for officials here in oklahoma today is finding the missing, and they are vowing to search and search until everyone is accounted for. this was the bedroom. reporter: bobby steinburg rode out the tornado in the basement of a neighbor s house, but when she returned above ground, the place she called home in el reno, oklahoma, was gone. i guess it was our time. so, you know, we just have to take it one day at a time. reporter: now she faces the same task that so many other people in the heartland are
small space. doesn t seem like there s much from keeping that door from blowing open or you guys getting sucked out. yeah. the doors were shaking pretty violently. on top of everything else, hitting the building. whenever the crane i guess it was a crane that did it. something fell on top of the building and then water just started pouring in here. oh, no, here we go. i ve always wondered what those people thought when that stuff went on, but when you come out of it, you really know. reporter: does your family believe you go back to the story, show them the pictures, have they seen what you went through? my wife said, really, you took a picture of the tornado? well, babe, you never know. might be a photojournalist one day. reporter: wolf, david has been able to keep his sense of humor but he s lost a lot of street sleep. he says it s hitting him now. he said he was able to think so fast. he said years ago in west,
facing. they are picking up, clearing out, and starting over. i have so many great friends and relatives that are helping get through this. reporter: the severe weather system broke out friday, tearing a path of death and destruction across the midwest. in oklahoma, three storm chasers died in pursuit of a tornado. flood waters swept people away in at least three states. the search continues for some people who sought shelter from the twisters in storm drains, but likely drowned and were swept away. it s a recovery, at this point in time, this happening friday night, the likelihood and chance of a survival of this would be slim. reporter: neighborhoods are in ruin, schools heavily damaged, cars smashed and trucks toppled. this will be a long recovery process, but with a little help, steinburg says a fresh start is possible. you have to have faith and hope and just, you know, not worry about the future so much, plan for the future, but not
could have caught them either off guard or even putting down some of their equipment ready to go back up into the cloud hoping to intercept that tornado, the equipment that is, but unfortunately the car was intercepted, too. these are very courageous people who risk their lives for this kind of information. our deepest condolences to their families. amid all of the horrifying stories of those who lost their lives in friday s storm, there are also lots of stories of survival. nick valencia has this part of the story. reporter: we started out and we were just watching the storms out the bay doors right here and they said it was south ever the airport. so we didn t think a whole lot about it. then we started getting debris coming into the shop and the winds picked up, hail. so we came outside and rounded the corner, and that s when we saw the tornado. and it was probably just a hundred yards from us. reporter: what do you think? it was so close. had to stop and take a picture fi
inside of it already. that s the key to saving lives on the ground, saving lives in the city, wolf. and that s what those storm chasers were doing. as this particular incident and obviously a tragic ending what do you think went wrong? reporter: i don t know what went wrong. there are searchers looking for the camera in fields south of here about three miles. and when they find the camera, if they do, we ll know a lot more. there may have been extenuating circumstances with this because tim would go back to help chasers that were in trouble. if that s what he did, he put his own life in jeopardy to go help someone else and may have gotten himself killed. that s one possibility. another possibility, wolf, is this storm made an entire left-hand turn, not 90 degrees but 60 degrees, got much wider and got much faster. and it almost caught our car. we were about a mile away, but that was still too close for me. for a while we were seven miles away and keeping pace with it. that s ho