Volunteers gather in the aftermath

Dispatch from reporter Rose French:

Close to 500 volunteers gathered to help clean up damage from the tornado Monday morning near the offices of Urban Homeworks, a faith-based nonprofit which rehabilitates homes in north Minneapolis for low-income and other families. Urban Homeworks, Sanctuary Covenant Church and other non-profit or faith-based groups organized the clean-up effort, which will be going on for days to come.

Ryan Petersen, development director with Urban Homeworks, said volunteers split off in groups of about 15 and picked up debris from trees along the streets hardest hit by the tornado in North Minneapolis.

Some used chain saws to cut up downed trees and offered water and food to volunteers and people, whose homes were damaged in the storm. Petersen said he expects up to 1,000 people to volunteer on Tuesday, when the group will continue cleanup efforts.

"We're starting to get a number of individual homeowners calling us up saying this is my specific need," Petersen said. "We're hearing about a lot of holes in roofs, windows that need replaced or boarded up. It's mostly repairing roofs ... at a minimum getting tarps on the roofs."

Volunteers on Monday were met with a post-apocalyptic scene as they drove in vans along streets strewn with downed trees, power lines, pink fiber-glass insulation and broken glass. Many streets in the Jordan neighborhood, one of the hardest hit, were impassable.

Police and other emergency officials had a number of streets blocked to public traffic, but allowed the volunteers in to begin helping with the massive clean-up.

He said he was a child when a deadly tornado hit the Fridley area in 1965, and he remembers huddling in his basement. His family was not injured and did not suffer severe damage, but he empathized with those affected by Sunday's tornado.

"That's as bad or worse than what I've seen," Neuman said after driving through the tornado damage. "I don't think I've ever seen anything like this. People need help, and I'm glad I could be here."

Betsy Ruppert-Kan, a homemaker from Robbinsdale who volunteered Monday, said her husband and two children were at an antique store not far from her home when the tornado hit.

"If we hadn't stopped (at the store), we would have driven right through the path of the tornado," she said, adding that she felt immensely lucky and wanted to assist others if she could. She said she also once lived in North Minneapolis a decade ago and still feels a kinship with the community.

"I think anybody in this situation would feel overwhelmed," she said. "I have the luxury of being able to do this. It helps you not feel so helpless."

He's hopeful the tornado's devastation will highlight the economic challenges and hardships faced by many people in parts of North Minneapolis.

"This is a metrological tornado, but there have been sociological, financial tornados that have hit this area for a long time," he said. "There's just been a lot of instability. But this (tornado) calls us to lay some things aside and figure out how we're going to get this (cleanup) done."