Houses lay shredded and entire neighborhoods flattened in the wake of Sunday’s storms in Lee County, Alabama, where the deaths occurred. Sheriff Jay Jones of Lee County said it was as if someone “took a giant knife and just scraped the ground.”
Jones said that several people were still unaccounted for and that crews were sorting through the debris in hopes of finding survivors.
Bill Harris, the Lee County coroner, said the three children among the dead were a 6-year-old, a 9-year-old who died at the hospital and a 10-year-old. He said he had been told that in at least one case multiple members of the same family had died.
Jones said officials had begun to identify some of the victims and 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 intensive care. The East Alabama Medical Center in Opelika, Alabama, had received more than 60 patients as of Sunday night, according to John Atkinson, a spokesman for the center.
The National Weather Service said that officials would be surveying at least five suspected tornado tracks in southeast Alabama on Monday. On Sunday, the weather service said it believed one of the tornadoes had been at least an EF-3 storm, with wind speeds of at least 136 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.”
A survivor was upended with her trailer
Becky Boyd, who lives in Beauregard, had heard tornado warnings before and never thought much of them. Then Sunday, her sister called: A tornado was close. Get to a safe place.
The storm struck before Boyd could even get all the way into a closet. Its force pushed her in face-first as it rolled the mobile home onto a shed. When the house stopped moving, she said, her husband could see the sky, and she was lying amid windblown insulation.
“I couldn’t get out ‘til he moved some stuff,” Boyd, 53, recalled Monday morning in a telephone interview. “I don’t know that I heard the tornado, or if it was a combination of the trailer rolling — it was just loud booms, just constant booms.”
Their trailer had crushed the shed.
“It’s totally overwhelming,” she said as she hunted through the wreckage for her purse. Locating her credit cards, she knew, could make storm recovery that much easier. “I think it took 12 years off my life, and I don’t have that many to afford to give up,” she said of the tornado.
She found her purse soon enough, but even that had insulation in it, she said. There was more searching to do, though: She needed her medicine and desperately wanted to find her cat, Loki.
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, 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.
An outpouring of help as a church prepares for evacuees
Scores of volunteers converged on Providence Baptist Church in Opelika on Monday and began sorting supplies, which were soon stacked high on folding tables.
There were piles of clothes and pyramids of blankets. Beneath one table, a cardboard box held Ziploc bags of essentials: toilet paper, toothpaste, soap and the like. Cases of bottled water lined one wall.
“This is how things work in a small community: When help is needed, everyone gets together and gets it done,” said Scarlett Baker, who was serving as the de facto mayor of the relief operation at Providence.
By midmorning, her wish list was becoming clearer: Children’s Motrin and Tylenol, so those with mild fevers could avoid crowded hospitals. Baby wipes. Ointments.
The church was preparing for a possible influx of evacuees after sundown Monday. During the day, volunteers said, they expected that many people were out trying to salvage what remained of their homes.
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 is working with Providence Baptist Church to establish a shelter.
The Church of the Highlands, with locations across the state, is assembling groups of volunteers.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.