Knight Township, Ind. – Amy Lamastus and Ryan Belwood were woken up just before 2 a.m. Sunday by an awful, ominous rumble that grew louder and louder at their mobile home.
When the tornado roared in, “it was as if someone had reached down with a giant hand on top of the trailer,” Belwood said, “and we started rocking back and forth.”
The couple ran hand-in-hand to their bathroom and crouched in the tub, Belwood shielding Lamastus. Neither could hear the other, and the pressure on their ears was almost unbearable. But each sensed in the squeeze of the other’s hand some sheer gratitude; their sons, 7 and 5, were spending the night away from Eastbrook Mobile Home Park with their grandparents.
When the rocking was over, the autumn tornado had left a miles-long swath of destruction from northwestern Kentucky to southwestern Indiana, killed at least 22 people and injured at least 200, officials said. Brad Ellsworth, Vanderburgh County sheriff, said at least 17 died at the mobile-home park about 8 miles southeast of Evansville.
The other deaths were reported in Warrick County, east of Evansville. No deaths were reported in Kentucky.
At Eastbrook Mobile Home Park, the trailer where Belwood and Lamastus lived was torn off its foundation, and when they returned Sunday afternoon, their home was no longer habitable. As they grabbed the few clothes they could find and threw them into a plastic garbage bag, they recalled the nightmarish scene of hours before.
“We could hear people screaming for help, screaming that they were trapped,” said Lamastus, 27, a customer-service representative for a credit-card company.
Added Belwood, 26, a factory press operator: “You started smelling the gas; it was so thick you couldn’t breathe. … You could hear the gas hissing out, like a broken fire hose.”
The scene at the trailer park was an odd mixture of rescue workers gingerly searching through the debris and the loud beeping of bulldozers and other equipment that sorted the rubble into giant piles.
Twelve hours after the twister struck, emergency crews found an 8-year-old boy, dressed only in Jockey shorts, alive under layers of debris.
“He was a small kid” but a tough one, said Jerry Bulger, chief of the Perry Township volunteer fire department, who was leading a rescue crew. “We heard this voice crying out for help. He kept asking us to get him out of there. He said he was thirsty; he really wanted something to drink.”
The boy, whose name was not released, had cuts and other injuries and was taken to a hospital. He was “conscious and talking” throughout, Perry said: “The kid was in good spirits when he left my sight.”
In the mobile-home park, the dead ranged from toddlers to elderly retirees, authorities said.
Just a mile or so from where the twister touched down, the maple trees were showing brilliant autumn foliage. But just beyond the trailer park, strands of pink and yellow insulation hung in the trees, giving them the look of spectral, frosted Christmas trees.
The tornado was the deadliest in Indiana since April 3, 1974, when a series of twisters killed 47 people and destroyed about 2,000 homes.
Sirens went off a short time before Sunday’s tornado hit, and some people who were still awake said they had seen warnings on television.
Larry and Christie Brown rode out the storm inside one mobile home.
“Man, it was more than words can say,” Larry Brown said. “We opened the door, and there wasn’t anything sitting there.”
National Weather Service officials said the tornado was touched off in part because of the collision of a cold front moving into the Ohio River Valley with unusually mild, humid weather of recent days.
Ryan Presley, a meteorologist with the weather service in Paducah, Ky., said the tornado touched down near Smith Mills, in northwestern Kentucky, then jumped over the Ohio River and cut a 15- to 20-mile path through Indiana’s Vanderburgh and Warrick counties. Top wind speeds were above 158 mph, he said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Deadliest U.S. tornadoes
A tornado that killed at least 22 in Indiana is the deadliest in the United States since a 1999 twister left 36 dead in Oklahoma City. Most fatalities in a single tornado in the U.S.:
Date Deaths
March 18, 1925 695
Missouri, Illinois and Indiana
April 5, 1936 216
Tupelo, Miss.
April 6, 1936 203
Gainesville, Ga.
April 9, 1947 181
Woodward, Okla.
June 8, 1953 115
Flint, Mich.
June 9, 1953 94
Worcester, Mass.
May 25, 1955 80
Blackwell, Okla., and Udall, Kan.
Feb. 21, 1971 58
Cary-Pugh City, Miss.
April 10, 1979 42
Wichita Falls, Texas
May 3, 1999 36
Oklahoma City
Sources: Harold E. Brooks and Charles A. Doswell III, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/National Severe Storms Laboratory
