The death toll soared to nearly 300 Thursday as rescuers dug through rubble from Mississippi to Virginia in the nation’s deadliest natural disaster since Hurricane Katrina.
Not since April 3, 1974, had the U.S. witnessed so much destruction from twisters. Tornado experts say Wednesday might go down in history as the most destructive tornado outbreak in eight decades.
Alabama took the most brutal pounding, the entire state scarred by a monster funnel cloud that crossed the state on a track that struck Tuscaloosa head-on and chewed through the Birmingham suburbs before exiting into Georgia. At least 210 Alabamans died.
“This place looks like a war zone,” Jackie Wuska Hurt, director of development for the honors college at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, wrote in an e-mail. “Folks looked like refugees walking single file with suitcases or grocery carts of their belongings down the sidewalks of University Boulevard.”
President Barack Obama, who called the damage “nothing short of catastrophic,” will tour the devastated region today before going to Florida for the space-shuttle launch.
“It’s almost total disbelief,” said Phyllis Little, director of emergency management for Cullman County, Ala., a largely rural area of 82,000 peppered with small towns.
“The county courthouse lost its roof. The Baptist church has a skeleton for a steeple. Old buildings that have been there for hundreds of years have just collapsed.”
The entire county is without power, and emergency responders are operating on natural-gas generators. Little has been turning away volunteers who have called her office, offering to come to Cullman to help.
“Fuel is an issue for us,” Little said. “We’re struggling to provide that to the emergency-response agencies. If you don’t live here or have business here, don’t come.”
Widespread destruction
Local TV stations in Alabama captured stunning footage of the squat, black maelstrom as it chewed a path through Tuscaloosa shortly before dusk Wednesday. It rode along an interstate highway and came within a mile of the football stadium that is home to the fabled Crimson Tide.
The university has closed, canceling final exams and postponing graduation exercises until August. Power outages shut down most forms of communication, but students could still track the news through Twitter.
“Somehow the Twitter feeds keep coming,” said Ian Sams, 22, a senior. “You’d see people tweeting from shelters saying, ‘We need blankets, we need diapers, if you can bring them, bring them.’ “
As with any tornado, the destruction could seem capricious, with obliterated areas bracketed by neighborhoods that were merely windblown.
“There’s very little middle ground. Either you took a beating, like you really were just devastated by it or — I went to my parents’ house, and they have power — and it’s just another day,” said Brandi Freeman, 21, a senior.
Alabama’s Emergency Management Agency said 31 of the state’s 67 counties had reported damage. Most are in the central and northern parts of the state.
“This was the big one,” said James- Paul Dice, chief meteorologist at WBRC Fox 6 in Birmingham. “A monster of a storm.”
Dice said the biggest tornado passed 2 miles from the station as most of his co-workers took shelter. He continued broadcasting, telling his viewers that this was unlike anything he had seen in his 16 years in the business.
That this would be a day of severe storms had been known many days in advance, thanks to computer models of the weather pattern. But Dice said he was shocked Wednesday morning at some of the numbers he was seeing. He said there is a measure of potential tornadic activity known as the “energy helicity index.”
Anything in the range of 3 or 4 would suggest a possible tornado. On Monday came a forecast of a 6 for Wednesday. Then, Wednesday morning, the index jumped to 14.
“It was off the charts,” Dice said. “This was almost like made-up numbers.”
Meteorologists are on the ground examining the damage to get a precise handle on the number of distinct tornadoes and their intensity.
“The outbreak is the biggest in terms of tornadoes and in terms of impact since ’74, and it’s possible that it’s actually bigger than ’74,” said Harold Brooks, research meteorologist at the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Okla.
The April 3, 1974, outbreak sparked twisters across the eastern United States, killing 310 people, Brooks said. Wednesday’s outbreak might be most similar to the tornado outbreak of March 21, 1932, when 332 people were killed, including 268 in Alabama, he said. Nothing, however, comes close to the destruction of March 18, 1925, when 747 people died, most of them along the path of a single twister, the so-called Tri-State Tornado that tore up Missouri, Indiana and Illinois.
Recipe for catastrophe
Brooks said the conditions have been ripe in recent weeks for just such a catastrophe.
Cold, dry air aloft, powered by the jet stream, blows in from the west, meeting the low-level, warm, moist air moving north from the Gulf of Mexico. If the cold fronts are strong enough, they’ll suppress tornado formation. But if they’re weak, the result can be a deadly compromise between the colliding air masses: The warm air at ground level will be moving in a different direction from the air higher up.
That is a recipe for the rotational energy that spawns a tornado.
The storms shut down the three nuclear reactors at the Browns Ferry power plant 30 miles west of Huntsville, Ala., a plant of similar design to the severely damaged Fukushima Dai ichi power plant in Japan.
But unlike Fukushima Daiichi, when Browns Ferry lost primary power, the plant’s diesel generators kicked in to keep the reactors cool, said Barbara Martocci, a spokeswoman for the Tennessee Valley Authority, which operates the 3,274-megawatt facility.
“The plant is shut down safely,” she said, meaning that control rods dropped into the reactors when power went off line, stopping nuclear fission.
While Alabama was hit the hardest, the storm spared few states across the South. Thirty-three people were reported dead in Tennessee, 33 in Mississippi, 14 in Georgia, five in Virginia and one in Kentucky.
The New York Times and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Helping tornado victims
• American Red Cross: U.S. mobile-phone users can text REDCROSS to 90999 to add $10 automatically to their phone bill. Or visit or call 800-733- 2767.
• Catholic Charities: The charity accepts disaster donations via phone (800-919-9338) or .
• Salvation Army: The charity is providing food, drinks and spiritual support to victims. Text GIVE to 80888 to donate $10 through your phone bill. Call 800-725-2769 or visit disaster.salvationarmyusa .
