across six states were killed in tornadoes
unleashed by a vicious storm system that leveled
towns and was threatening to cause more mayhem
in heavily populated parts of the U.S. South on
Tuesday.
In Arkansas and Mississippi, the hardest hit states,
more than 23 people were killed and more than
200 injured over the last three days by tornadoes
that reduced homes to splinters, snapped trees like
twigs and lifted trucks into the air.
Deaths were also reported in Oklahoma and Iowa
on Sunday, and Alabama and Tennessee on
Monday.
Makeshift shelters have been set up for thousands
of families forced out of their homes while the
National Guard, local police and residents who had
lost all their possessions sifted through the rubble
looking for more victims.
"People were running around screaming, trying to
find their kids. There was nothing left," Melba Reed
said as she described the aftermath of a tornado in
Louisville, Mississippi, a town of about 7,000 in the
central part of the state.
A massive area home to tens of millions of people
stretching across large parts of the South and into
Pennsylvania and Ohio was under some threat from
the storm system that spawned the tornadoes,
forecasters said.
"We will see tornadoes again today and
unfortunately, the areas that are under the gun
today are the same ones that were under the gun
yesterday," said Bill Bunting, operations chief at the
National Weather Service's Storm Predictions Center
in Norman, Oklahoma.
Southern and eastern Mississippi as well as central
and western Alabama were under the highest
threats for tornadoes, damaging winds and hail, he
said.
Tens of thousands of customers along the path of
the storm were without power on Tuesday
morning, with the worst outages in parts of
Alabama and Georgia, utility companies reported.
In western North Carolina, fire department
personnel used boats to rescue people from homes
and vehicles hit by flash floods during the night.
In Arkansas, residents of central Faulkner County,
where most of the damage occurred, sorted
through the rubble as they tried to piece their lives
back together.
"There is joy because you find something that's not
broken and then you find something that's
shattered that meant a lot," said Terry Lee, whose
home was damaged by a tornado.
The White House said President Barack Obama
declared a major disaster in Arkansas and ordered
federal aid to supplement state and local recovery
efforts.
Some tornadoes registered an EF-3 on the
Enhanced Fujita scale that measures strength,
meaning they packed winds of about 150 mph,
according to preliminary estimates from the
National Weather Service in Alabama.
In Tupelo, Mississippi, which was in the path of a
tornado on Monday, police were going house to
house searching for victims and trying to seal any
gas leaks that could fuel fires.
More than 2,000 houses and 100 commercial
properties were damaged by a tornado that ripped
through the city on Monday, officials said.
Officials were also picking through the rubble in
Lincoln County, Tennessee, near the Alabama state
line, where a tornado touched down on Monday,
killing two people.
"The roof is just wiped away from South Lincoln
Elementary School," said water department worker
Tammy Allen. "They had a bus that was slammed into the front
door of the school. It's all just devastating," she
said.
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