ATKINS, Ark. - Residents in five Southeastern states awoke yesterday to widespread clusters of destruction caused by an unusually ferocious winter tornado system. At least 52 people were killed and scores more were injured.
Many had spent a harrowing Tuesday night amid breaking glass and warning sirens as the tornadoes tossed mobile homes into the air, collapsed the roof of a Sears store in Memphis, whittled away half a Caterpillar plant near Oxford, Miss., and shredded dorms at Union University in Jackson, Tenn., leaving crews to rescue nine students trapped in the rubble.
Arkansas and Tennessee were the hardest hit, with Arkansas reporting 13 dead and Tennessee 28. In Atkins, 70 miles northwest of Little Rock, a middle-aged couple and their 11-year-old daughter died when their house was wiped out by a direct hit, and in northwestern Alabama the bodies of another family of three were found 50 yards from the foundation of their ruined home.
In Macon County, Tenn., a 74-year-old man whose trailer was destroyed died in view of his family as they waited for an ambulance to navigate debris-strewn roads. Thirty-five injuries were reported in Gassville, a small community in Baxter County, Ark., that was almost leveled by the storm.
"The wrath of God is the only way I can describe it," Governor Phil Bredesen of Tennessee said after surveying the damage by helicopter. "I'm used to seeing roofs off houses; houses blown over. These houses were down to their foundations, stripped clean."
The governor said 1,000 houses in Tennessee were destroyed. President Bush announced he would head to the state today to view the damage.
Much of the havoc was wreaked by rare "long-track" tornadoes, which stay on the ground for distances of 30 to 50 miles. One tornado in Arkansas seems to have crushed a path through five counties, said Renee Preslar, the public education coordinator for the Arkansas Division of Emergency Management.
"Normally, tornadoes touch down and . . . pop back up," Preslar said. "There's no signs yet of this having ever come off the ground."
Yesterday, the storm, a bit tamer, moved on to Ohio and the Great Lakes and was expected to reach the East Coast last night.
Tornado specialists said there was no evidence that the deadly outbreak was related to global warming or anything other than the clash of contrasting cold and warm air masses that usually precedes such events.
Dr. Harold Brooks, a meteorologist at the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Okla., said there is a long history of midwinter storms exacting a deadly toll. The most lethal February was in 1971, when a series of tornadoes ripped across Louisiana and Mississippi, killing 134 people.
The number of deaths in a storm is as much a function of chance and location as the number of tornadoes, he added. Brooks pointed out that the biggest midwinter outbreak of twisters on record, on Jan. 21-22, 1999, included 134 tornadoes, but nine deaths.
In Jackson, Matt Taylor, a junior at Union University, was scouring the campus yesterday for his missing jeep after a close call that left him with staples in his scalp and a bandaged leg.
On Tuesday night Taylor had hunkered down in Waters Commons, a residence building, when the sirens went off, but when a door blew open he was sucked outside, bringing with him a gumball machine he had grabbed hold of. "By the time I got back in, it exploded," he said of the building.
Although 80 percent of the residential section of the campus was demolished or severely damaged, there were no fatalities, for which officials credited the college's disaster plan. Across the Southeast, residents said they owed their lives to early warning systems.
"I've lived in Champaign, Ill., and in southern Mississippi, and neither place had a decent early-warning system like we do here in Moulton," said Elaina Peyton, who now resides in Moulton, the county seat of Lawrence County, Ala. "We heard the sirens last night at about 2 a.m. and so our daughter knew to come downstairs and we knew that something was happening. The television went out around 3:30 or so and we just followed the news on the radio."
The destruction began in Arkansas in the late afternoon on Tuesday. A tornado that residents described as a massive black wall of wind and debris tore a 6-mile swath through the center of Atkins, a rural, agricultural town with a population of about 3,300, killing four people and injuring at least eight others, including one deputy who broke an ankle.
Major Dillard W. Bradley, chief deputy of the Pope County sheriff's department, said 60 to 80 structures "were completely blown away."
A cluster of one-story, wooden houses along Highway 64, one of Atkins's main streets, were torn off their foundations and reduced to rubble.
Pat Veverka, a truck driver, sifted through the remains of his one-story wooden house. "I don't know where to start," Veverka said, his eyes filling with tears. "I know it sounds like a cliche, but you just never think."
