The Morning Journal (Lorain, OH)
23 dead, several missing in tornadoes
BEAUREGARD, ALA. >> Rescue crews using dogs and drones searched for victims amid splintered lumber and twisted metal Monday after the deadliest U.S. tornado in nearly six years ripped through a rural Alabama community. At least 23 people were killed, some of them children.
Dozens were missing in Lee County nearly a day after the twister struck, according to the sheriff, who said that crews had combed the hardest-hit areas but that other places had yet to be searched.
The winds Sunday afternoon obliterated numerous homes, leaving huge, jumbled piles of wood and household belongings. Some homes were reduced to concrete slabs.
Debris was scattered across the countryside, with shredded metal hanging from the pine trees.
“I’m not going to be surprised if we don’t come up with some more deceased. Hopefully we won’t,” Coroner Bill Harris said.
He said the dead included almost entire families and at least three children, ages 6, 9 and 10.
A post on the Lee-Scott Academy’s Facebook page said fourthgrader Taylor Thornton was among those killed.
On the day after the disaster, volunteers used chain saws to clear paths for emergency workers.
Neighbors and friends helped one another find some of their belongings in the ruins.
Carol Dean found her wedding dress among the wreckage of her mobile home. But the storm took her 53-year-old husband.
She said David Wayne Dean was at home Sunday afternoon and had texted a friend to beware when the tornado hit.
“He didn’t make it out,” she said.
Dean said she rushed home from her job at Walmart when she couldn’t reach her husband on the phone. She pushed her way past sheriff’s deputies who tried to keep her out of the damaged area. Her children had found David Dean’s body in a neighbor’s yard.
“They took me down to him,” Dean said, “and I got to spend a little time with him before they took him away.”
At the R&D Grocery, rattled residents asked one another if they were OK. And a big banner that read “#BEAUREGARDSTRONG” was hung on a fence at Beauregard High School.
The National Weather Service said one and possibly two tornadoes struck the area, with a powerful EF-4 twister with winds estimated at 170 mph blamed for most of the destruction. It carved a path nearly a mile wide and 24 miles long, said meteorologist Chris Darden.
Darden said the “monster tornado” was the deadliest twister to hit the U.S. since May 2013, when an EF-5 killed 24 people in Moore, Oklahoma.
“It looks like someone almost just took a giant knife and scraped the ground,” Sheriff Jay Jones said.
County Emergency Management Director Kathy Carson said she was “pretty sure” that tornado sirens in Beauregard sounded warnings but that authorities were busy with the search-and-rescue and had not yet looked into the question.
Crews searching door-to-door used dogs as well as drones that can detect heat from a body. “We’re basically using everything we can get our hands on,” the sheriff said.
President Donald Trump tweeted that he told the Federal Emergency Management Agency to give Alabama “the A Plus treatment.”
The twister was part of a powerful storm system that slashed its way across the Deep South, spawning numerous tornado warnings in Georgia, South Carolina and Florida.