South staggering in tornadoes' ruins

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. - Southerners found their emergency safety net shredded Friday as they tried to emerge from the nation's deadliest tornado disaster since the Great Depression.

Emergency buildings are wiped out. Bodies are stored in refrigerated trucks. Authorities are begging for such basics as flashlights. In one neighborhood, the storms left firefighters to work without a truck.

The death toll from Wednesday's storms reached 329 across seven states, including 238 in Alabama, making it the deadliest U.S. tornado outbreak since March 1932, when another Alabama storm killed 332 people. Tornadoes that swept across the South and Midwest in April 1974 left 315 people dead.

Hundreds if not thousands of people were injured Wednesday, 990 in Tuscaloosa, and as many as one million Alabama homes and businesses remained without power.

The scale of the disaster astonished President Obama when he arrived in the state Friday. "I've never seen devastation like this," he said, standing in bright sunshine amid the wreckage in Tuscaloosa, where at least 45 people were killed and entire neighborhoods were flattened.

Mayor Walt Maddox called it "a humanitarian crisis" for his city of more than 83,000.

He said up to 446 people were unaccounted for in the city, though he added that many of those reports probably were from people who have since found their loved ones but have not notified authorities. Cadaver-detecting dogs were deployed in the city Friday, but they had not found any remains, he said.

During the mayor's news conference, a man asked him for help getting into his home, and broke down as he told his story. "You have the right to cry," Maddox told him. "And I can tell you the people of Tuscaloosa are crying with you."

At least one tornado - a 205 m.p.h. monster that left at least 13 people dead in Smithville, Miss. - ranked in the National Weather Service's most devastating category, EF-5. Meteorologist Jim LaDue said he expected "many more" of Wednesday's tornadoes to receive that same rating, with winds topping 200 m.p.h.

Tornadoes struck with unexpected speed in several states, and the difference between life and death was hard to fathom. Four people died in Bledsoe County, Tenn., but a family survived being tossed across a road in their modular home, which was destroyed, Mayor Bobby Collier said.

By Friday, residents whose homes were blown to pieces were seeing their losses worsen - not by nature, but by man. In Tuscaloosa and other cities, looters have been picking through the wreckage to steal what little the victims have left. "The first night they took my jewelry, my watch, my guns," Shirley Long said Friday. "They were out here again last night doing it again."

Overwhelmed Tuscaloosa police imposed a curfew and got help from National Guard troops to try to stop the scavenging.

Along their flattened paths, the twisters blew down police and fire stations and other emergency buildings along with homes, businesses, churches, and power infrastructure. The number of buildings lost, damage estimates, and number of people left homeless remained unclear two days later, in part because the storm also ravaged communications systems.

Tuscaloosa's emergency management center was destroyed, so officials used space in one of the city's most prominent buildings - the University of Alabama's Bryant-Denny Stadium - as a substitute before moving operations to the Alabama Fire College. Less than two weeks ago, the stadium hosted more than 90,000 fans for the football team's spring intrasquad Red-White Game.

Also wiped out was a Salvation Army building, costing Tuscaloosa much-needed shelter space. And that's just part of the problem in providing emergency aid, said Sister Carol Ann Gray of the local Catholic Social Services office. "It has been extremely difficult to coordinate because so many people have been affected - some of the very same people you'd look to for assistance," Gray said.

Emergency services were stretched particularly thin about 90 miles to the north in the demolished town of Hackleburg, Ala., where officials were keeping the dead in a refrigerated truck amid a body-bag shortage. At least 27 people were killed there and the search for missing people continued, with FBI agents fanning out to hospitals to help.

Damage in Hackleburg was catastrophic, said Stanley Webb, chief agent in the county's drug task force. "When we talk about these homes, they are not damaged. They are gone," he said.

Fire Chief Steve Hood said he desperately wanted flashlights for the town's 1,500 residents because he did not want them using candles that could ignite their homes.

Gail Enlow was in town looking for her aunt, Eunice Cooper, who is in her 70s. She wiped away tears as she pointed to the twisted mess that remained of the housing project where Cooper lived. "Nobody's seen her," she said.

Alabama emergency management officials said Friday that the state had 238 confirmed deaths. There were 34 deaths in Mississippi, 34 in Tennessee, 15 in Georgia, five in Virginia, two in Louisiana, and one in Kentucky.

In Hackleburg, Kathy McDonald glanced around her town and quietly wept. Her family's furniture store, which sold tables and couches for decades, was torn apart.

"I just can't understand this. Are people coming to help us?" she said. "We feel all alone."

As state officials in Missouri lost a legal battle to avoid an intentional levee break along the Mississippi River, residents in the flood

zone below the earthen barrier cleared out of their homes Friday.

The Army Corps of Engineers is considering a plan to use explosives to blow a 2-mile-wide hole through the levee to ease waters rising around the upstream town of Cairo, Ill.

A federal judge Friday

gave the corps the go-ahead to break the levee to ensure navigation and flood control.

Illinois, Kentucky, and Tennessee approve of the plan, but Missouri sought a temporary restraining order to block the detonation.

Attorney General Chris Koster immediately appealed the ruling Friday to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, but it wasn't immediately clear when

the court would rule.

Residents in the floodplain appeared resigned to leaving. Late Friday, officials announced power to the area would be cut.

- AP

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