Obama to visit scene of deadly tornados in South
TUSCALOOSA, Alabama (AP) - Obama planned Friday to tour parts of Alabama that were devastated by an outbreak of tornados that killed nearly 300 people...
TUSCALOOSA, Alabama (AP) — President Barack Obama planned Friday to tour parts of Alabama that were devastated by an outbreak of tornados that killed nearly 300 people in the U.S. South, as survivors tried to recover what was left of their belongings.
The loss of life — at least 297 dead — is the greatest from an outbreak of U.S. tornadoes since April 1974, when the weather service said 315 people were killed by a storm that swept across 13 Southern and Midwestern states.
The storms did the brunt of their damage in Alabama. More than two-thirds of the victims lived there, and large cities bore the scars of half-mile-wide (kilometer-wide) twisters that rumbled through. The high death toll seems surprising in the era of sophisticated radar and precise satellite forecasts. But the storms were just too wide and too powerful to avoid a horrifying body count.
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Those who took shelter began returning home Thursday, struggling with no electricity and little help from stretched-thin law enforcement. And they were frustrated by the near-constant presence of gawkers who drove by in search of a cellphone camera picture — or worse, a trinket to take home.
“It’s just devastation. I’ve never seen this,” said Sen. Richard Shelby during a visit to storm-ravaged Tuscaloosa. “This is the worst tornado devastation I’ve ever seen.”
President Barack Obama planned a trip to Tuscaloosa, one of the hardest-hit cities, on Friday to view storm damage and meet Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley and shattered families. Late Thursday, Obama signed a disaster declaration for the state to provide federal aid to those who seek it.
The search and rescue efforts in Alabama bore eerie similarities to the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when town after town lay flattened for nearly 90 miles (145 kilometers). Authorities in Concord and elsewhere even painted the same “X’’ symbols they did in New Orleans to mark which homes they searched and how many survivors were found.
Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, was criticized for being slow to respond to Hurricane Katrina and not visiting areas of Louisiana and Mississippi devastated by the storm.
As many as a million homes and businesses in Alabama were without power, and Bentley said 2,000 National Guard troops had been activated to help. The governors of Mississippi and Georgia also issued emergency declarations for parts of their states.
“We can’t control when or where a terrible storm may strike, but we can control how we respond to it,” Obama said. “And I want every American who has been affected by this disaster to know that the federal government will do everything we can to help you recover and we will stand with you as you rebuild.”
The storms seemed to hone in on populated areas by hugging the interstate highways and obliterating neighborhoods and even entire towns from Tuscaloosa to Bristol, Virginia.
Concord, a small town outside Birmingham, was so devastated that authorities closed it down to keep out the curious. Randy Guyton’s family, which lived in a stately home at the base of a hill in the center of Concord, rushed to the basement garage, piled into a truck and listened to the roar as the twister devoured the house in seconds. Afterward, they saw outside through the shards of their home and scrambled out.
“The whole house caved in on top of that car,” he said. “Other than my boy screaming to the Lord to save us, being in that car is what saved us.”
Derrick Keef was on a scavenger hunt for his most priceless possessions after a tornado obliterated his Concord house. His guns were in the ruins of a neighbor’s home. A Christmas heirloom shared space in a ditch with broken glass and jagged nails. And his 7-year-old son’s bike — one of the few toys he could salvage — was pinned under a car a block away.
“I’ve been going from lot to lot finding stuff,” he said as he rifled through debris, in search of a family photo album. “It’s like CSI.”
Alabama emergency management officials in a news release early Friday said the state had 210 confirmed deaths. There were 33 deaths in Mississippi, 33 in Tennessee, 15 in Georgia, five in Virginia and one in Kentucky. Hundreds if not thousands of people were injured — 800 in Tuscaloosa alone.
Some of the worst damage was in Tuscaloosa, a city of more than 83,000 that is home to the University of Alabama. The storms destroyed the city’s emergency management center, so the school’s stadium was turned into a makeshift one.
Shaylyndrea Jones, 22, had expected to graduate from the University of Alabama this weekend with a degree in sports science. Instead, she spent Thursday moving out of her ruined apartment, where she rode out the storm huddled in a hallway. But graduation suddenly isn’t so important — she’s just thankful she and her roommates survived the night.
“It was the scariest thing I’ve been through,” she said. “We were saying our prayers as it was coming down the street.”
Police used bullhorns to tell people not to cross the tape to a neighborhood they were searching. On the other side, people were walking over glass, through pools of water, endless piles of debris and smashed cars. The city imposed a 10 p.m. curfew for Thursday and an 8 p.m. limit for Friday.
Hundreds of people walked in a long, slow procession down Tuscaloosa’s main four-lane drag. Some shot pictures and videos of what had been a bustling community. Others came to search the wreckage of their homes.
Seventy-three-year-old Frank Frierson sat on a porch and marveled at the damage.
“It was God up there letting us now that he is the boss, what he could tear up and what he could destroy,” he said.
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Bluestein reported from Concord, Alabama; Nelson from Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Associated Press writers Holbrook Mohr in Phil Campbell, Alabama; Jay Reeves in Tuscaloosa; Phillip Rawls in Montgomery; Vicki Smith in Morgantown, West Virginia; Kristi Eaton in Norman, Oklahoma; Ray Henry in Ringgold, Georgia; Meg Kinnard in Columbia, South Carolina; Michelle Williams in Atlanta; and Bill Poovey in Chattanooga, Tennessee, contributed to this report.
Copyright 2011 The Associated Press.
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