TUSCALOOSA, Ala. (AP) — Southerners have found their emergency safety net shredded as they try 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 even left firefighters to work without a truck.
Across the South, volunteers have been pitching in as the death toll from Wednesday’s storms keeps rising. At least 340 people were killed across seven states, including at least 249 in Alabama, as the storm system spawned tornadoes through several states.
It was the largest death toll since March 18, 1925 when 747 people were killed in storms that raged through Missouri, Illinois and Indiana.
Hundreds – if not thousands – of people were injured Wednesday, including an estimated 990 in Tuscaloosa alone. As many as 1 million Alabama homes and businesses remained without power yesterday.
The scale of the disaster astonished President Barack Obama when he arrived in Alabama on 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.
Maddox 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, Maddox 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 mph 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 expects “many more” of Wednesday’s tornadoes to receive that same rating, with winds topping 200 mph.
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.
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. “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 remains unclear, in part because the storm also ravaged communications systems.