Rescue teams and residents combed through storm-wrecked towns to assess damage on Saturday from a chain of tornadoes that cut a 1,000-mile swath of destruction from the Midwest to the Gulf of Mexico, as the death toll crept up to at least 37 people.
The fast-moving twisters spawned by massive thunderstorms splintered blocks of homes, damaged schools and a prison, and tossed around vehicles like toys, killing 18 people in Kentucky, 14 in neighboring Indiana, three in Ohio and one in Alabama, officials said. Georgia also reported a storm-related death.
In Tallapossa, Alabama residents began cleaning up and trying to salvage anything that might be left after the deadly storm.
“We were actually watching TV, watching the news…when we saw that that the storm was really bad,” local Resident Ed Sellier said
“It looked like from everything that we could tell it was going to be a dead on hit so we went up to my father-in law, mother-in-law’s house. They got a brick house up there and we went to stay with them. After it was over with we came down and this is what we had. It was a direct hit.”
Friday’s storms, spanning 1,000 miles from the Gulf of Mexico to near the Great Lakes, came on top of severe weather earlier in the week in the Midwest and brought the overall death toll to 49.
Television footage from some of the worst-hit towns in Indiana and Kentucky showed houses lifted from their foundations, trees downed and stripped of their foliage, and rubble scattered across wide swathes of land.
Indiana State Trooper Shaun Hannon described the close call of a friend, a fellow trooper.
“He was at the top of the steps, he had just hung up the phone from his wife and stuck the phone in his pocket. He was at the top of the steps getting ready to go down and he said his ears popped real bad and the windows blew in and he woke up in the basement,” Hannon said.
Tornadoes smashed Indiana and Kentucky, with Alabama, Georgia, Ohio and Tennessee overrun as well.
U.S. President Barack Obama called the governors of Indiana, Kentucky and Ohio to offer condolences and assure them that the federal government was ready to help if needed, the White House said.