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23 Dead in Alabama After Powerful Storms Strike

Officials in Lee County, Alabama — where the deaths occurred — were assessing the extent of the destruction left in the wake of Sunday’s storms and were sorting through the debris in hopes of finding survivors.

Multiple children were killed, including a 6-year-old, officials said, and all of the dead were found in the same general area, just south of the city of Opelika, Alabama.

“We had several families that have probably lost everybody in their whole family,” Bill Harris, the Lee County coroner, told CNN on Monday.

Sheriff Jay Jones of Lee County said Monday that he expected the death toll to rise. Several people — a number in the double digits — were still unaccounted for, he said, without giving the exact figure.

Dozens of people were sent to hospitals Sunday with injuries, with at least two in critical condition. The East Alabama Medical Center in Opelika had received more than 60 patients as of Sunday night, according to John Atkinson, a spokesman for the center.

The National Weather Service confirmed Sunday that at least one tornado at least a half-mile wide had touched down in the southern part of Lee County, with winds of 136 to 165 mph. Tornadoes were also reported to the south and east in Georgia and Florida.

Federal officials estimated Monday that 1,120 housing units had been damaged in the storm.

‘We anticipate the number of fatalities may rise,’ the sheriff says

At a news conference Monday morning, Jones said the hardest-hit location was a rural area of at least a square mile where most of the residences were mobile or manufactured homes.

“Unfortunately, we anticipate the number of fatalities may rise as the day goes on,” he added. “I have not seen this level of destruction, ever.”

More than one tornado, he said, may have touched down in Beauregard, an unincorporated community of 8,000 to 10,000 people south of Opelika, and much of the area was without electric power. Between 100 and 200 people were deployed there to conduct searches Monday, he added, adding that drones with infrared sensors that can detect heat signatures of trapped survivors would also be used.

“I would describe the damage that we have seen in the area as catastrophic,” Jones said. “Complete residences are gone.”

“It looks almost as if someone took a giant knife and just scraped the ground,” he added later.

The sheriff said that dozens of homes were destroyed and that some debris appeared to have been thrown more than a half-mile by the winds. He said officials had identified many of the dead, but were still trying to contact their families.

“This hurts my heart,” he said.

“These people are tough, resilient people and it’s knocked them down,” he added, “but they’ll be back.”

Residents are waking up to survey the damage

At a Waffle House in Opelika, near the worst of the destruction, customers and employees traded tragic news about the storm and its aftermath Monday: Were their relatives OK? Did they have electricity? Was one highway or another passable?

“Is that open?” one woman asked while she waited at the counter. “It was closed last night,” the server replied sadly.

In Beauregard, a few miles to the south, bundled-up state troopers and sheriff’s deputies manned blockades as more blue lights flashed in the distance. The temperature stood not much higher than freezing.

How one man rode out the storm by sheltering at a gas station

Alex Miller, 27, was driving with two passengers from Savannah, Georgia, to his home in Birmingham, Alabama, on Sunday evening when they were alerted on their cellphones that tornadoes might be approaching. They stopped at a gas station in Columbus, Georgia, to let one wave of the storm system pass, and continued to head north, hoping to break through the worst of the weather during the lull.

As they neared Smiths Station, Alabama, they passed a gas station with a billboard toppled over. They then passed a police blockade diverting southbound traffic off the main roads. The skies darkened, the rain grew stronger — “all the ominous signs,” Miller said.

“The plan quickly pivoted from ‘We need to drive north’ to ‘We need to pull over and seek shelter immediately,'” he said.

Miller pulled into a gas station in Smiths Station and sheltered in a hallway in the back with about 10 other people, including children, and a dog. The power was out inside and the light outside continued to dim. It was “post-sunset dark,” Miller said. The wind whipped outside, in what appeared to be one of the tornadoes to hit the Lee County area.

“The energy was pretty tense,” he said.

After the worst weather abated, Miller said, he got into the car and drove north, past debris strewn around the roads. Within 15 minutes, he saw sunshine.

There were more tornado deaths on Sunday than in all of 2018

There has been a relative lull in deadly tornadoes in the United States lately, especially in 2018, when only nine deadly tornadoes were reported, causing 10 deaths. A more typical year might see 15 to 20 deadly tornadoes, according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration statistics.

Contrast that with 2011, the most ferocious year for tornadoes in decades, when 59 deadly storms claimed 553 lives. Nearly all struck in a three-month period from late February to late May, including one tornado in Missouri that left 158 people dead.

After the 2011 outbreak, which killed more than 230 people in Alabama alone, some communities ordered upgrades to storm shelters, and residents became extraordinarily sensitive about even the threat of poor weather.

Sunday’s weather was a “fairly classic” pattern for March, where colder air mixes with warmer air, said James Spann, the chief meteorologist for WBMA television, the local ABC affiliate.

“This is clearly the biggest loss of life we’ve had in my state in a while,” he said. “In fact, we had more deaths in Lee County, Alabama, today than the entire United States last year.”

Alabama is a state familiar with storms

Tornadoes can strike nearly anywhere in the country when conditions are right, but they are most common in the southern Plains and the South, especially in a broad area called Dixie Alley stretching from Kansas and Oklahoma to Georgia.

In that region, modern digital systems are in wide use to alert residents by text message and on social media to approaching storms, but old-fashioned siren warnings still play an important role.

Officials advise anyone who lives in tornado-prone areas to take precautions and to have a plan that can be followed quickly when the alarm sounds, since tornadoes can develop quickly and are hard to predict with much precision or with much advance notice. But in communities that have not seen a tornado in recent memory, the danger can seem abstract, and not everyone heeds the advice to prepare.

Here’s how you can help

If you are outside the affected area, sending money to established charities is the best way to help. The American Red Cross can be reached by phone at (334) 749-9981 or online at redcross.org. The Alabama Governor’s Relief Fund is also accepting donations.

The Red Cross is also a good place to start if you are in the area hit by the tornadoes. The organization is leading the effort to help people find family members, and it has a shelter at Providence Baptist Church in Opelika.

The Church of the Highlands, with locations across the state, is assembling groups of volunteers.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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