Two dead in Alabama as tornadoes fueled by record heat hit US south
Tornadoes damaged homes, destroyed a fire station, briefly trapped people in a grocery store and ripped the roof off an apartment complex in Mississippi while two people died as a tree hit their mobile home in Alabama, authorities said on Wednesday.
The National Weather Service (NWS) had warned that strong twisters capable of carving up communities over long distances were possible as the storm front moved east from Texas. They were fueled by record high temperatures and threatened a stretch of the US where more than 25 million people live.
A total of 73 tornado warnings and 120 severe thunderstorm warnings were issued from Tuesday afternoon to Wednesday morning, said Matthew Elliott, a meteorologist at the Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma.
Two people were killed in Flatwood, Alabama, north of Montgomery.
“They were in their home that was struck by a tree due to the tornado,” said Christina Thornton, director of the Montgomery county emergency management agency.
Search and rescue teams would continue going door to door until everyone is accounted for, said the Montgomery
county sheriff, Derrick Cunningham.
Isaiah Sankey, vice-chair of the Montgomery county commission, expressed grief and vowed that installing storm shelters will be a priority for the small community as it recovers.
“When we do rebuild, we will have storm shelters,” he said. “We have got to prepare for these unforeseen circumstances.”
In the western Alabama town of
Eutaw, video from WBMA-TV showed large sections of the roof missing from an apartment complex, displacing 15 families in the middle of the night.
“We’ve got power lines, trees just all over the road,” the police chief, Tommy Johnson, told WBRC-TV.
A suspected tornado damaged numerous homes in Hale county, where the emergency director said more than a third of the people live in highly vulnerable mobile homes.
“I have seen some really nice mobile homes tied down, but they just don’t stand a chance against a tornado,” Russell Weeden told WBRC.
Two people were injured as the storm tore apart houses in Caldwell parish, Louisiana, the sheriff, Clay Bennett, told KNOE-TV.
The NWS confirmed that tornadoes hit the ground in Mississippi. Images of wreckage in Caledonia showed a grocery store damaged, a fire station shredded and a house toppled, but the county emergency director, Cindy Lawrence, told WTVA-TV everyone escaped injury.
High winds downed power lines, and flooding was a hazard as more than 5in of rain fell within several hours in some places. More than 50,000 customers in Mississippi and Alabama were without electricity, according to poweroutage.us.
Forecasters had warned of possible tornadoes for several days. Elliott, who coordinates the warnings, said it took a lot of work to get the word out as people celebrated the holidays, and it seemed people were taking the threat seriously.
“It’s a very vulnerable part of the country for tornadoes – especially tornadoes after dark,” Elliott said. “We all have to work together to get the best results on these types of events that could potentially lead to lots of devastation.”
Record high temperatures in Texas and Louisiana intensified the storm front before it moved into Mississippi and Alabama, forecasters said.
Shreveport, Louisiana, heated up to 81F (27.2C) on Tuesday while Tyler, Texas, hit 82F (27.8C), according to the NWS in Shreveport. Both marks broke the old record of 80F, set in 1949.