A string of violent storms tore away at small towns in Indiana and cut off rural communities in Kentucky as an early season tornado outbreak killed 29 people and US authorities feared the already ugly death toll would rise as daylight broke on yesterday’s search for survivors.
Massive thunderstorms, predicted by forecasters for days, unleashed dozens of tornadoes as they raced on Friday from the Gulf Coast to the Great Lakes. Twisters that crushed entire blocks of homes knocked out cellphones and landlines alike, ripped power lines from broken poles and tossed cars, school buses and tractor-trailers onto roadways made impassable by debris.
Weather that put millions of people at risk on Friday killed 29, but both the scale of the devastation and the breadth of the storms made an immediate assessment of the havoc’s full extent all but impossible.
In Kentucky, the US National Guard and state police headed out to search wreckage for an unknown number of missing. In Indiana, authorities searched dark county roads connecting rural communities that officials said “are completely gone.”
“We won’t know what’s going on before daybreak,” said Sheriff’s Major Chuck Adams of Clark County, Indiana, where one person was known to have died in hard-hit Henryville. “Right now, we’re getting by through the night as best we can.”
For those still in the town of about 2,000 north of Louisville, Kentucky, the birthplace of Kentucky Fried Chicken founder Colonel Harland Sanders, that meant walking down debris-filled streets with shopping carts full of water and food, handing it out to anyone in need. Hundreds of firefighters and police zipped around a town where few recognizable structures remained; all of Henryville’s schools were destroyed.
“It’s all gone,” resident Andy Bell said as he guarded a friend’s demolished service garage, not far from where a school bus stuck out from the side of a restaurant, and a parking lot where a small classroom chair jutted from a car window.
“It was beautiful,” he said, looking around. “And now it’s just gone. I mean, gone.”
Susie Renner, 54, said she saw two tornadoes barreling down on Henryville within minutes of each other. The first was brown from being filled with debris; the second was black.
“I’m a storm chaser and I have never been this frightened before,” Renner said.
Friday’s outbreak came two days after an earlier round of storms killed 13 people in the Midwest and South, and forecasters at the US National Weather Service’s Storm Prediction Center had said the day would be one of a handful this year that warranted its highest risk level. By 10pm on Friday, the weather service had issued 269 tornado warnings. Only 189 warnings were issued in all of last month.
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