Storms kill over 30 across America
Source: Agencies |
March 4, 2012, Sunday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
A STRING of violent storms scratched away at small towns in Indiana and cut off rural communities in Kentucky as an early-season tornado outbreak killed more than 30 people.
US authorities feared the already ugly death toll would rise as daylight broke to search for survivors yesterday.
Massive thunderstorms, predicted by forecasters for days, threw off dozens of tornadoes as they raced on Friday from the Gulf Coast to the Great Lakes. Twisters that crushed entire blocks of homes knocked out telephone lines, ripped power lines from broken poles and tossed cars, school buses and tractor-trailers onto roadways.
Weather that put millions of people at risk on Friday killed 31, but both the scale of the devastation and the breadth of the storms made an immediate assessment of the havoc's full extent all but impossible.
In Kentucky, the National Guard and state police headed out to search wreckage for an unknown number of missing. In Indiana, authorities searched county roads connecting rural communities that officials said "are completely gone."
"We won't know what's going on before daybreak," cautioned Sheriff's Major Chuck Adams of Clark County, Indiana, where one person was known to have died in Henryville. "Right now, we're getting by through the night as best we can."
For those still in the town of about 2,000 north of Louisville, Kentucky, that meant walking down littered streets with shopping carts full of water and food, handing it out to anyone in need. Hundreds of firefighters and police zipped around a town where few recognizable structures remained; all of Henryville's schools were destroyed.
"It's all gone," resident Andy Bell said as he guarded a friend's demolished service garage. "It was beautiful. And now it's just gone."
US authorities feared the already ugly death toll would rise as daylight broke to search for survivors yesterday.
Massive thunderstorms, predicted by forecasters for days, threw off dozens of tornadoes as they raced on Friday from the Gulf Coast to the Great Lakes. Twisters that crushed entire blocks of homes knocked out telephone lines, ripped power lines from broken poles and tossed cars, school buses and tractor-trailers onto roadways.
Weather that put millions of people at risk on Friday killed 31, but both the scale of the devastation and the breadth of the storms made an immediate assessment of the havoc's full extent all but impossible.
In Kentucky, the National Guard and state police headed out to search wreckage for an unknown number of missing. In Indiana, authorities searched county roads connecting rural communities that officials said "are completely gone."
"We won't know what's going on before daybreak," cautioned Sheriff's Major Chuck Adams of Clark County, Indiana, where one person was known to have died in Henryville. "Right now, we're getting by through the night as best we can."
For those still in the town of about 2,000 north of Louisville, Kentucky, that meant walking down littered streets with shopping carts full of water and food, handing it out to anyone in need. Hundreds of firefighters and police zipped around a town where few recognizable structures remained; all of Henryville's schools were destroyed.
"It's all gone," resident Andy Bell said as he guarded a friend's demolished service garage. "It was beautiful. And now it's just gone."
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