Sack

sack
verb, transitive. To dismiss from employment. To put into a sack or sacks. To plunder and destroy a captured town, building or other place.

When the news crews were finally able to enter the area, the video they aired was staggering: a swath of land half a mile wide--fields, suburbs, strip malls--looked as if a host of giants had sacked it. Topsoil and young crops had been sucked away, houses were reduced to splinters, rows of prosperous businesses were demolished, leaving empty slabs. Cars and trucks lay tumbled about like the toys of an unruly child, their bodywork so battered and their paint so scoured they appeared to have aged thirty years. Where the tornado had crossed roads, the asphault had been vacuumed up. When we saw that, we couldn’t help but wonder where those chunks had come down, for surely they must have fallen somewhere.

Definitions adapted from The New Oxford American Dictionary, Oxford University Press, Inc., 2005 (eBook Edition, copyright 2008), and from Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam Company, Publishers, Springfield, Massachusetts, USA, 1965, depending on which is more convenient to hand.