200 killed as tornadoes rip South
PLEASANT GROVE, Ala. — Dozens of tornadoes spawned by a powerful storm system wiped out entire towns across a wide swath of the South, killing at least 200 people, and officials said today they expect the death toll to rise.
Alabama's state emergency management agency said it had confirmed 131 deaths, while there were 32 in Mississippi, 15 in Tennessee, 13 in Georgia, eight in Virginia and one in Kentucky.
The National Weather Service's Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Okla., said it received 137 tornado reports around the regions into Wednesday.
“We were in the bathroom holding on to each other and holding on to dear life,” said Samantha Nail, who lives in a blue-collar subdivision in the Birmingham suburb of Pleasant Grove where the storm slammed heavy pickup trucks into ditches and obliterated tidy brick houses, leaving behind a mess of mattresses, electronics and children's toys scattered across a grassy plain where dozens used to live. “If it wasn't for our concrete walls, our home would be gone like the rest of them.”
One of the hardest-hit areas was Tuscaloosa, a city of more than 83,000 and home to the University of Alabama. The police and other emergency services were devastated, the mayor said, and at least 15 people were killed.
A massive tornado, caught on video by a news camera on a tower, barreled through the city late Wednesday afternoon, leveling it.
By nightfall, the city was dark. Roads were impassable. Signs were blown down in front of restaurants, businesses were unrecognizable and sirens wailed off and on. Debris littered the streets and sidewalks.
College students in a commercial district near campus used flashlights to check out the damage.
At Stephanie's Flowers, owner Bronson Englebert used the headlights from two delivery vans to see what valuables he could remove. The storm blew out the front of his store, pulled down the ceiling and shattered the windows, leaving only the curtains flapping in the breeze.“It even blew out the back wall, and I've got bricks on top of two delivery vans now,” Englebert said.A group of students stopped to help Englebert, carrying out items like computers and printers and putting them in his van.The storm system spread destruction from Texas to New York, where dozens of roads were flooded or washed out.The governors in Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia each issued emergency declarations for parts of their states.Around Tuscaloosa, traffic was snarled by downed trees and power lines, and some drivers abandoned their cars in medians.“What we faced today was massive damage on a scale we have not seen in Tuscaloosa in quite some time,” Mayor Walter Maddox said.University officials said there didn't appear to be significant damage on campus, and dozens of students and locals were staying at a 125-bed shelter in the campus recreation center.In Huntsville, meteorologists found themselves in the path of severe storms and had to take shelter in a reinforced steel room, turning over monitoring duties to a sister office in Jackson, Miss. Meteorologists saw multiple wall clouds, which sometimes spawn tornadoes, and decided to take cover, but the building wasn't damaged.“We have to take shelter just like the rest of the people,” said meteorologist Chelly Amin, who wasn't at the office at the time but spoke with colleagues about the situation.In Kemper County, Miss., in the east-central part of the state, sisters Florrie Green and Maxine McDonald, and their sister-in-law Johnnie Green, all died in a mobile home that was destroyed by a storm.“They were thrown into those pines over there,” Mary Green, Johnnie Green's daughter-in-law, said, pointing to a wooded area. “They had to go look for their bodies.”
