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'Boom, boom, over'
07/02/2008 20:34 - (SA)
Memphis - Southern US states mourned on Thursday after tornadoes wrought havoc across the region, killing 55 people and injuring hundreds, smashing buildings and flinging trees like matchsticks.
Dozens of tornadoes sliced across the region late Tuesday and early Wednesday, leaving a trail of destruction in five states and deaths in four, in what US media called the deadliest US tornado outbreak in two decades.
In hardest hit Tennessee, the death toll rose to 31, with one other person presumed missing, the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency said.
Thirteen people were killed in Arkansas, seven in Kentucky and four in Alabama, and hundreds were injured in those states and in Mississippi, officials said.
"We've never seen anything like this. It will take 15 years to clean everything up. But the people here will never be the same," said Barry Newberry, a town constable in Lafayette, Tennessee who arrived to help neighbours along a road where every house was destroyed.
"Everybody was running around like they were drunk. They were just dazed and devastated. It was dark and everybody was hollering," he said.
"I've seen tornadoes on the ground and I've seen them in the air, but this was different. This one was wide, a massive funnel," Jean Byrd of Mason, Tennessee, a town of just over 1 000 residents, said.
'We were lucky'
With a sigh of relief, Byrd added: "It touched down just after it passed our house. We were lucky."
It took only two minutes for one twister to turn a commercial centre southeast of Memphis into a horrific wreck and leave behind three dead.
It looked like a bomb hit the main building: the front was torn away and the roof collapsed, with glass and tiles spilled across the ground.
"It swept through in a matter of one and a half, two minutes. Boom, boom, over," said Memphis police officer Roderic Cunningham, who said looters had quickly followed the storm's destruction.
The worst barrage of tornadoes in recent memory in the region left up to 35 000 people around Memphis powerless early Wednesday and facing up to a week for power to be restored.
Rescue teams were going from door to door across the countryside to check for injured and survivors.
Prayers and relief
President George W. Bush offered prayers and disaster relief for the victims.
"Prayers can help, and so can the government," Bush said on Wednesday.
In northern Alabama, elderly Gibbson Hill resident Mary Files said she was sound asleep when the storm hit, tearing out the walls and roof of her home.
"It woke me up when the stuff in the house went to falling in. I got my daughter up and we went to the end of the hall by the heater and that's where we stayed."
Students at Union University in Jackson, Tennessee, heroically rescued classmates trapped in the dead of night after two campus dormitories collapsed, university president David Dockery said.
Fifty-one students were treated in hospital, including some with extensive injuries. But no one was killed, even though 1 200 students were on campus at the time.
"It's an amazing thing," Dockery said.
The campus has already been rebuilt once after a 2002 tornado caused $2.6m in damage. Now, "we are estimating that the damage is at least 15 times what that was then," he said.
The same turbulent weather front could delay Thursday's planned launch of space shuttle Atlantis from Florida's east coast.
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