The Nebraska Emergency Management Agency estimated the tornado — which struck the less-residential southeast part of town — was at least an EF3 on the Enhanced Fujita Scale, which ranges from the weak EF0 to the top-of-the-scale EF5.

That twister was one of as many as nine to hit northeast Nebraska and northwest Iowa on Friday.

Damage amounts in Wayne will reach into the millions of dollars, Mayor Ken Chamberlain said.

Pat Garvin, owner of Innovative Protectives Inc., which makes sports cushions such as pole vaulting pits, said his business was “done.”

The tornado destroyed three aluminum-sided buildings and ruined about 90 percent of the main structure on his property on the southeast side of town — the area hit hardest by the storm. The damage would cost at least $500,000, he guessed.

At the airport, the loss of a single hangar and its contents was estimated at more than $1 million, the mayor said. Chamberlain said the storm destroyed another two of the airport’s six buildings and damaged the other three.

Friday’s storms came the day after a tornado damaged several homes and businesses in the Hickman, Bennet and Palmyra areas in southeast Nebraska. To the west in the Nebraska Panhandle and parts of South Dakota, residents dug out from beneath a heavy blanket of snow.

Tornadoes destroyed 20 farmsteads in Iowa’s Woodbury County and damaged about 60 more, the local emergency manager told The Associated Press.

The worst damage in Wayne took place on the east side of town at the airport and an industrial park, but the tornado also destroyed several homes on the downed trees around the Wayne State College campus, which otherwise appeared OK.

Dee Goeden, an 81-year-old woman who’s lived on the southern edge of Wayne for some 30 years, said she lost an antique shed, a garage and a 40,000-bushel grain bin on her property.

She was on the phone with her son when the tornado hit late Friday afternoon, and weathered the storm in her basement.

She came upstairs and looked outside when the worst of it was over, she said: “I stood in the door with my mouth dropped wide open, and tears started flowing. Everything was gone.”