Asia-Pacific

Tornadoes devastate South US, killing at least 281

(Agencies)
Updated: 2011-04-29 09:14

Jan Sullivan finds a license plate in her daughter's destroyed house in the aftermath of deadly tornados in Tuscaloosa, Alabama April 28, 2011. Tornadoes and violent storms ripped through seven southern states, killing at least 284 people in the country's deadliest series of twisters in nearly four decades. [Photo/Agencies]

In Concord, a small town outside Birmingham that was ravaged by a tornado, Randy Guyton's family got a phone call from a friend warning them to take cover. They rushed to the basement garage, piled into a Honda Ridgeline and listened to the roar as the twister devoured the house in seconds. Afterward, they saw daylight through the shards of their home and scrambled out.

At least three people died in a Pleasant Grove subdivision southwest of Birmingham, where residents trickled back Thursday to survey the damage. Greg Harrison's neighborhood was somehow unscathed, but he remains haunted by the wind, thunder and lightning as they built to a crescendo, then suddenly stopped.

Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley said his state had confirmed 195 deaths. There were 33 deaths in Mississippi, 33 in Tennessee, 14 in Georgia, five in Virginia and one in Kentucky. Hundreds if not thousands of people were injured - 600 in Tuscaloosa alone.

That twister and others Wednesday were several times more severe than a typical tornado, which is hundreds of yards wide, has winds around 100 mph and stays on the ground for a few miles, said research meteorologist Harold Brooks at the Storm Prediction Center.

The loss of life is the greatest from an outbreak of US tornadoes since April 1974, when the weather service said 315 people were killed by a storm that swept across 13 Southern and Midwestern states.

Brooks said the tornado that struck Tuscaloosa could be an EF5 - the strongest category of tornado, with winds of more than 200 mph - and was at least the second-highest category, an EF4.

Search and rescue teams fanned out to dig through the rubble of devastated communities that bore eerie similarities to the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when town after town lay flattened for nearly 90 miles.