Mike Sutton, his daughter, Aryca, 4, his wife, Jessica, and their dog Mia walk with a suitcase full of their belongings Saturday as they evacuate Greensburg after Friday night's deadly tornado.

Haviland ? By some standards, Danny and Marisha Vernon got off lightly.

The tornado that virtually destroyed Greensburg damaged their home, breaking windows, pulling off shingles and knocking it off its foundation. The house, they said, smells like an electrical fire – but at least it’s still standing.

“It’s not as bad as everybody else’s was, and I almost feel guilty for that,” Marisha Vernon said Saturday, occasionally fighting back tears as she stood outside a Red Cross emergency shelter at Barclay College in nearby Haviland. “I almost feel like we should have gotten hit just as bad as everybody else.”

But the courthouse gazebo where the Vernons were married is gone. So are their friends’ homes – and most likely, the computer sales and repair business Danny Vernon was about to launch from home.

“The computer equipment is all gone,” he said. “That was the one thing I had to keep us going, to keep me going.”

The tornado killed nine people and injured dozens more when it tore through the area Friday night.

But the survivors said things could have been much worse, and that people started pulling together even in the storm’s immediate aftermath.

“Everybody was out there, hollering, ‘Are you OK? Are you OK?’ Marisha Vernon said. “That was the good part of it.”

The twister caught Frank Gallant, 47, at home with his miniature pinscher, “No. 5.” Even with 20 minutes’ advance warning, Gallant had no place to go.

Gallant, who is disabled and uses a wheelchair, had no basement. And with the storm’s track nearly a mile and a half wide, the whole city was in its path.

So he moved to the center of his house and rode out the twister, all the while wondering if he would survive.

“You just hope you’ve lived up to the Lord’s expectations, and you’re going to the good place and not the bad,” Gallant said, sitting with his dog outside the college building.

When he emerged, he said, “My house was in the middle of the street.”

Terry Gaul, a janitorial supplies salesman from Sedgwick, was on his way back from a business trip to Syracuse when he and his partner pulled into the local John Deere dealership to wait out what they thought was a hailstorm.

They soon found out just how much worse it was.

“The next thing we heard was this loud rumble,” said Gaul, his red polo shirt stained with blood and his face crosshatched with cuts. “There were these two John Deere combines sitting there, and the next thing I know, they started rocking. Then we started spinning like a windmill, and I said, ‘Oh, boy, it’s all over with now.”‘

The tornado rolled Gaul’s van, throwing him into the back seat. When he came out, he noticed something missing.

“I never seen where those two combines went,” he said.

The Red Cross set up three shelters in Haviland, one in Mullinville and another in Bucklin. The number of people using those shelters was not immediately available late Saturday afternoon.

William and Alisa King and their two children arrived by bus to the shelter at Haviland High School around 3 a.m. Saturday, almost six hours after the tornado hit.

William King wanted to go back and start sorting out his property, trying to keep his family’s papers and mementos from getting even more damaged by the continuing stormy weather, but a mandatory evacuation was in effect.

“I’m a taxpayer, and that’s my property,” he said. “I want my stuff.”

Eventually – perhaps as early as today – Greensburg’s residents will be allowed back in.

And what they see in broad daylight is likely to shock them all over again.

“It’s going to be hard, because even when we see it on the news, all the devastation, I can’t help but cry,” Marisha Vernon said. “But everybody’s going to make it. Everybody will, I think.”

Alisa King agreed.

“We’ve got each other,” she said, hugging her children. “That’s what’s important.”