Enterprise, Ala. – Students fought back tears Saturday at Enterprise High School as President Bush mourned eight of their classmates killed when a tornado ripped their school, leaving tattered math textbooks strewn amid the rubble.
“Out of the devastation can come hope and a better tomorrow,” Bush said, standing with his arm around a student who had a tear running down her face. “Our thoughts, of course, go out to the students who perished. We thank God for the hundreds who lived.”
Bush made the hastily arranged trip to highlight his administration’s stepped-up efforts, especially by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, to provide immediate help to disaster victims. The White House came under withering criticism for its response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
In all, 20 people were killed by 31 tornadoes that struck the Midwest and Southeast on Thursday.
From his Marine One helicopter, Bush got a bird’s-eye view of damage in the two states where roofs were pockmarked with holes, trees stood without tops, a steeple rested on the ground in front of a church, wide swaths of homes and businesses lay in shambles and clumps of yellow insulation hung in branches like cotton candy.
The water tower in Enterprise, a city of 22,000 in the southeastern corner of the state, was still standing. But the nearby high school, scene of the worst loss of life, looked as if it had been smashed by a wrecking ball.
Bush climbed over piles of black roofing, concrete, broken glass and math textbooks that littered the remains of the school for 1,200. He was taken on a private tour of a hallway, lined with blue lockers, where the eight students died and scores of others were trapped when the ceiling and walls collapsed.
The president also saw a wing of the school – now a pile of rubble – where students had hunkered down as the tornado approached.
Bush also toured Americus, Ga., where storms killed two people and destroyed dozens of homes and businesses.
