Stunned residents tried to salvage belongings, and rescue crews pulled survivors from beneath collapsed houses on Friday in the aftermath of a tornado-spawning storm system that killed at least nine people as it barreled across parts of Georgia and Alabama.
The widespread destruction came into view a day after violent storms flipped mobile homes into the air, sent uprooted trees crashing through buildings, snapped trees and utility poles, and derailed a freight train.
Those who emerged with their lives gave thanks as they searched the wreckage to find anything worth saving.
Photo: AP
“God was sure with us,” Tracey Wilhelm said as she looked over the shattered remnants of her mobile home in Alabama’s Autauga County.
She was at work on Thursday when a tornado lifted her mobile home off its foundation and dumped it several feet away.
A search crew also found five people unharmed but trapped in a storm shelter after a wall from the adjacent house fell onto it, Autauga County Coroner Buster Barber said. Someone inside had a phone and kept calling for help.
The US National Weather Service said that suspected tornado damage was reported in at least 14 counties in Alabama and 14 in Georgia. Temperatures were forecast to plunge below freezing overnight in hard-hit areas of both states, where more than 30,000 homes and businesses remained without power at sundown.
About 40 homes in the county were destroyed or seriously damaged, including mobile homes that were launched into the air, county emergency management director Ernie Baggett said.
In Selma, the city council met on a sidewalk using lights from cellphones and declared a state of emergency.
A five-year-old child riding in a vehicle was killed by a falling tree in central Georgia’s Butts County, Georgia Emergency Management and Homeland Security Director James Stallings said, adding that the parent who was driving experienced critical injuries.
Elsewhere, a state US Department of Transportation worker was killed while responding to storm damage.
Another storm hit Spalding County as mourners gathered for a wake at Peterson’s Funeral Home in Griffin, Alabama. About 20 people scrambled for shelter in a restroom and an office when a large tree fell on the building.
A La Nina weather cycle, warming of the Gulf of Mexico likely related to climate change and a decades-long eastward shift of tornado activity combined to form Thursday’s unusual tornado outbreak, Northern Illinois University meteorology professor Victor Gensini said.
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