Deadly day of tornadoes in U.S.
Rescuers search for victims east of Montgomery
BEAUREGARD, ALA. • Rescuers searched for victims Monday amid homes smashed to their foundations, shredded metal dangling from trees and dead animals lying in the open after at least one tornado ripped through a rural Alabama community. At least 23 people were killed, some of them children.
It was the deadliest day of tornadoes in the U.S. in nearly six years. Travelling at least part of the way down a country road, a twister carved a trail of destruction at least half a mile wide and about a mile long Sunday, overwhelming the Lee County coroner’s office, which was forced to call in help from the state, authorities said.
“It looks like someone almost just took a giant knife and scraped the ground,” Sheriff Jay Jones said. With daybreak, volunteers used chainsaws to clear paths for emergency workers, while at the R&D Grocery, people asked each other if they were OK.
“I’m still thanking God I’m among the living,” said John Jones, who has lived most of his life in Beauregard, an unincorporated community of roughly 10,000 people about 95 kilometres east of Montgomery near the Georgia state line. The twister, rated an EF3, with winds believed to be around 220 km/h or higher, 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. Patrick Marsh, warning co-ordination meteorologist at the National Weather Service’s Storm Prediction Center, said the deaths could have come from more than one tornado. There was another likely twister reported in the county, he said.
It was the highest single-day death toll from tornadoes in the U.S. since May 2013, when an EF-5 twister killed 24 people in Moore, Oklahoma, Marsh said. Julie Morrison and her daughter-in-law picked through the ruins of Morrison’s home in Beauregard, looking for keys and a wallet. They managed to salvage her husband’s motorcycle boots and a Bible. Morrison said she and her husband took shelter in the bathtub as the twister lifted their wooden house off the ground and swept it into a wooded area.
“We knew we were flying because it picked the house up,” Morrison said, figuring that the shower’s fibreglass enclosure helped them survive. She said her son-in-law later dug them out.
The sheriff said children were among the dead, but he didn’t know how many. And he said the death toll may rise as the search continues amid houses reduced to their concrete slabs.