Tornado kills 23 in Alabama

A tornado tore through the southern US state of Alabama on Sunday, killing 23 people, uprooting trees and causing “catastrophic” damage to buildings and roads, a local sheriff said. “Unfortunately our toll, as far as fatalities, does stand at 23 at the current time” Lee County Sheriff Jay Jones told the local CBS affiliate, acknowledging that children were among the dead.

Other people have been hospitalized, some with “very serious injuries,” he had earlier told reporters. Search operations for those still missing were halted on Sunday night due to hazardous conditions, but Jones added they would resume on Monday morning. “The devastation is incredible,” he said.

“I cannot recall at least in the last 50 years... a situation where we have had this loss of life that we experienced today.” Wrecked houses, downed trees The swath of destruction left by the storm was a quarter mile (0.4 kilometers) wide and stretched for the “several miles that it traveled on the ground,” according to Jones. Still and video images showed trees that had been snapped in two, debris-strewn roads and wrecked houses in the wake of the storm.

More than 6,000 homes were left without power in Alabama, according to PowerOutage.US, while 16,000 suffered outages in neighboring Georgia. Authorities warned the death toll could rise further as rescuers search through the debris in Beauregard, about 60 miles (95 kilometers) east of the state capital Montgomery. Television images showed the heavy rain had relented by dusk but many roads in the worst-hit areas were left littered with debris and unpassable.