BEAUREGARD (Alabama, US), March 5 (NNN-AGENCIES) — Rescuers in Alabama stepped up the search for survivors after two back-to-back tornadoes ripped across the southern state, with the death toll of 23 expected to rise further.
“I would describe the damage that we have seen in the area as catastrophic,” Lee County Sheriff Jay Jones said.
“I cannot recall at least in the last 50 years … a situation where we have had this loss of life,” Jones said.
He said the death toll stood at 23, some of them children. One of the dead was just six years old.
“We have several people who are still unaccounted for,” Jones said.”Unfortunately, we anticipate the number of fatalities may rise as the day goes on.”
Other people were hospitalised, some with “very serious injuries.”
Search operations for those still missing had to be halted on Sunday night due to hazardous conditions, but were renewed on Monday morning with agencies from across the state and from neighbouring Georgia joining the hunt.
The swath of destruction left was a 0.4-kilometre wide and stretched for the “several miles that it traveled on the ground,” according to Jones.
The powerful winds picked up a billboard from the Lee County Flea Market in Alabama and dumped it some 20 miles away, across the state line in Georgia, local media reported.
More than 6,000 homes were left without power in Alabama, according to PowerOutage.US, while 16,000 suffered outages in neighbouring Georgia.
The search for missing people was focused in the area around Beauregard, about 95 kilometres east of the state capital Montgomery.
President Donald Trump expressed his condolences to those affected and said on Twitter that the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, “has been told directly by me to give the A Plus treatment to the Great State of Alabama and the wonderful people who have been so devastated by the Tornadoes.”
Schools in the area were to remain closed on Tuesday and grief counselors would be on hand when they eventually reopened, schools superintendant James McCoy said.
“We’re trying to locate teachers, make sure they are okay and see if they need anything. We do know we have personnel that have lost houses,” McCoy said, quoted in local media. — NNN-AGENCIES
