brilliant. cute but, of course, that chinese icebreaker didn t reach them. still, the crew and passengers kept a pretty positive attitude. hi, everybody. it s mary here from antarctica having a wonderful time. you can see we have this wonderful, snowy wonderland. it s my birthday today. it couldn t be a better day to have a birthday with my 80-something new friends. blew out all the candles on my birthday cake which was heaps of fun. and i m out on the ice today. the research ship left on december 8 to study the effects of climate change. we ll keep you updated. and on wednesday obamacare finally goes into effect. this morning there s good news for the white house. more than 1 million people have signed up on healthcare.gov tess piety the site s rocky rollout. but is it enough? and will the obama administration be able to keep up the pace? still a lot of critics out there. cnn s athena jones joins us from honolu honolulu. reporter: good morning, kyra.
now, let s go to weather channel s julie martin who is live there, been covering that for us. one of the questions might be here, julie, is did they get warning any of the people that are in that town? yeah. in fact, the answer to that question, richard, is no. this is such a rural area that those sirens just didn t reach them. the timing couldn t have been worse coming just about 6:00 in the morning on a holiday for many people yesterday as they were sleeping in. i wanted to show you this, though. this is a piece of metal i picked up from the volunteer fire station here. see how it s twisted. you can see how the tornado just twisted it around, that rotation coming through quite strong on yesterday morning. in fact, the national weather service has preliminarily rated this an ef-3, which means those winds were upwards of 140 mile-an-homiles an hour and the width was 300 to 500 yard. we re talking about a very small area, about 100 homes here.