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'It looks like a bomb went off'
06/02/2008 14:01 - (SA)
Arkansas - Authorities went door-to-door trying to find additional victims of tornadoes that killed at least 26 people, ripped the roof off a shopping mall and blew apart warehouses as they tore across four states.
The dead included 12 people in Tennessee, 11 in Arkansas, and a mother and father who died in Kentucky with their adult daughter.
Those killed in Arkansas included another set of parents, who died with their 11-year-old in Atkins, about 100km northwest of Little Rock.
The family died on Tuesday when their home "took a direct hit" from the storm, Pope County Coroner Leonard Krout said.
"Neighbours and friends who were there said, 'There used to be a home there'," Krout said.
The twisters, which also slammed Mississippi, were part of a line of storms that raged across the country's midsection at the end of the Super Tuesday primaries in several states.
Students trapped
As the extent of the damage quickly became clear, candidates including Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee paused in their victory speeches to remember the victims.
Northeast of Nashville, Tennessee, a spectacular fire erupted at a natural gas pumping station northeast of Nashville that authorities said could have been damaged by the storms. An undetermined number of people were reported dead.
Eight students were trapped in a battered dormitory at Union University in Jackson, Tennessee, until they were finally freed.
Well after nightfall on Tuesday, would-be rescuers went through shattered homes in Atkins, a town of 3 000 near the Arkansas River. Around them, power lines snaked along streets and a deep-orange pickup truck rested on its side.
A navy blue Mustang with a demolished front end was marked with spray paint to show it had been searched.
Governor Mike Beebe planned to tour Atkins on Wednesday.
People washed away
In Memphis, high winds collapsed the roof of a Sears store at a mall. Debris that included bricks and air conditioning units was scattered on the parking lot, where about two dozen vehicles were damaged.
A few people north of the mall took shelter under a bridge and were washed away, but they were pulled out of the Wolf River with only scrapes, said Steve Cole of the Memphis Police Department.
In Mississippi, Desoto County Sheriff's Department Commander Steve Atkinson said a twister shredded warehouses in an industrial park in the city of Southaven, just south of Memphis.
"It ripped the warehouses apart. The best way to describe it is it looks like a bomb went off," Atkinson said.
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