Deep South death toll rises to 20 in midwinter barrage of tornadoes
ALBANY, Ga. — A tornado warning on television sent Anthony Mitchell, his pregnant wife and their three children scrambling for what little shelter their mobile home could provide. They crouched in a hallway as the winds started taking their home apart piece by piece.
“The windows exploded, the doors flew off the hinges, the sheetrock started to rip off the walls and fly out the windows,” Mitchell said. “The trailer started to lift up. And about that time a tree fell on the trailer, and I think that’s what held the trailer in place from flying away.”
An unusual midwinter barrage of tornadoes and thunderstorms over the weekend was blamed for at least 20 deaths across the Deep South. Among them were three people killed at Big Pine Estates, the mobile home park in Albany.
Residents reported a twister plowed into the neighborhood in the southwestern Georgia city of 76,000 people on Sunday afternoon, leaving the landscape strewn with broken trees and mangled sheet metal. Few of the roughly 200 homes escaped damage.
In addition to the three dead at Big Pine Estates, a fourth body was discovered at a home just outside the trailer park.
Georgia reported 15 deaths Sunday, and four people died Saturday in Mississippi. In northern Florida, a woman died after a tree crashed into her home in Lake City as a storm passed through.
The National Weather Service said 39 possible tornadoes were reported over the weekend. The agency sent out teams to examine the damage and confirm whether the storms were twisters.
At the Sunshine Acres mobile home park, Devocheo Williams, 29, said Monday his home was demolished the day after he moved in.
“The whole trailer park was gone in 15 seconds,” Williams said.