STORM STORIES
Mississippi
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One of the hardest-hit areas in Louisville was the dozen-building Eiland Plaza apartment complex, where authorities were still limiting access Tuesday. Yolanda Triplett was at home in her ground-floor apartment Monday when the tornado struck. “I was laying on my couch and I heard it,” Triplett said. “So I went to my hall closet and that’s where I was when it hit.” When Triplett came out, her apartment and belongings were shredded. “I had no windows, water was in there, bricks on the outside were torn off,” she said. She was one of 71 people who stayed in an American Red Cross shelter at Louisville’s First Baptist Church Monday night. Like some other residents of the apartment complex, she hadn’t figured out yet Tuesday where she would go.
Tennessee
When the TVs switched back from tornado warnings to regular programming, Darrell Haney thought his community outside Fayetteville was out of the woods. Then, live weather reports cut back in, warning of a possible tornado as little as a minute away from his home. Haney quickly retrieved two grandchildren and huddled in an interior bathroom with his wife, daughter and son-in-law. Almost immediately, he said, a tree crashed into a front room where one of the children had been sleeping, and the roof was lifted off of the master bedroom. “You know, the house is being torn apart around you, and we’re just crying out, ‘God protect us,’” Haney said. “Because at that point you’re totally hopeless and helpless.”
Alabama
Managers and neighbors at Billy Barb’s Court, a mobile home park west of Athens, Ala., begged in vain for one holdout family to take refuge in the park’s storm shelter late Monday as storm warnings sounded. Minutes later, they told the Huntsville Times, Dorothy Jean Hollis, 60, and her 33-year-old son Earl Carlton Hollis were dead of injuries suffered when a tornado hit their trailer. Earl Carlton Hollis’ wife, Minnie, was found trapped between the bodies of her husband and mother-in-law, calling for help. She was freed and taken to a hospital for treatment. “This is nothing I’m dealing with,” Teresa Ingram, the Hollis’ neighbor, told the newspaper as she took in the devastation that surrounded her Tuesday. “What I’m dealing with is the lost lives I saw yesterday that refused to go to the shelter. That’s what I can’t deal with.”
From news services
Arkansas
Fred Muawad has been through this before. Three years ago, his popular Daylight Donuts in Vilonia, Ark., survived a tornado. This time, it didn’t. The strong twister that struck the town of 3,800 on Sunday virtually wiped away the strip mall that housed Muawad’s small shop. He didn’t have insurance, and since he’s not sure of the strip mall will rebuilt, he wasn’t sure if he’d reopen. One thing was for sure, though: Vilonia was supporting him. “This community has been great to me — we’ve been one big family for 11 years,” Muawad said Tuesday. “We’ve been through good times and bad.”
Ruth Bennett died clutching the last child left at her day care center as a tornado wiped the building off its foundation. A firefighter who came upon the body gently pulled the toddler from her arms.
“It makes you just take a breath now,” said next-door neighbor Kenneth Billingsley, who witnessed the scene at what was left of Ruth’s Child Care Center in this logging town of 6,600. “It makes you pay attention to life.”
Bennett, 53, was among at least 35 people killed in a two-day outbreak of twisters and other violent weather that pulverized homes from the Midwest to the Deep South. The child, whose name was not released, was alive when she was pulled from Bennett’s arms and was taken to a hospital. Her condition was not known.
As crews in Mississippi and Alabama turned from search-and-rescue efforts to cleanup, the South braced for a third round of potentially deadly weather Tuesday, with at least one tornado reported near Fayetteville, N.C.
One of the hardest-hit areas in Monday evening’s barrage of twisters was Tupelo, Miss., where a gas station looked as if it had been stepped on by a giant.
Francis Gonzalez, who also owns a convenience store and Mexican restaurant attached to the service station, took cover with her three children and two employees in the store’s cooler as the roof over the gas pumps was reduced to aluminum shards.
“My Lord, how can all this happen in just one second?” she asked in Spanish.
On Tuesday, the growl of chain saws cut through the otherwise still, hazy morning in Tupelo. Massive oak trees, knocked over like toys, blocked roads. Neighbors helped one another cut away the fallen limbs.
“This does not even look like a place that I’m familiar with right now,” said Pam Montgomery, walking her dog in her neighborhood. “You look down some of the streets, and it doesn’t even look like there is a street.”
By the government’s preliminary count, 11 tornadoes — including one that killed 15 people in Arkansas — struck the nation’s midsection on Sunday, and at least 25 ravaged the South on Monday, the National Weather Service Storm Prediction Center said.
Among those killed was 21-year-old University of Alabama swimmer and dean’s list student John Servati, who was taking shelter in the basement of a Tuscaloosa home when a retaining wall collapsed on him.
His death — and that of at least two others in Alabama — came the day after the third anniversary of an outbreak of more than 60 tornadoes that killed more than 250 people across the state.
In Kimberly, Ala., north of Birmingham, the firehouse was among the buildings heavily damaged.
Four firefighters suffered little more than cuts and scrapes, but the bays over the fire trucks were destroyed, and the vehicles were covered with red bricks, concrete blocks and pieces of the roof.
The trucks were essentially trapped, so the town had to rely on nearby communities for emergency help.
Louisville was also one of the hardest-hit areas, with officials reporting at least nine dead in and around town because of a powerful tornado with a preliminary rating of EF4, just shy of the top of the scale.
Sennaphie Yates arrived at the small local hospital to check on her grandfather just ahead of the twister. As the funnel cloud closed in, staff members herded people into a hall.
“They had all of us against the wall and gave us pillows. They said, ‘Get down and … don’t get up,’” she said.
The winds knocked down two walls and tore holes in the roof. Doctors moved some emergency room patients to a former operating room and sent some to other hospitals.
Bennett’s day care center was not far from the hospital. Her niece Tanisha Lockett had worked at Ruth’s Child Care since it opened seven years ago.
She said all but the one child — a 4-year-old girl who had been in the center’s care since she was a baby — had been picked up before the storm.
On Tuesday, Bennett’s family and those who worked for her stepped over schoolbooks, first aid supplies and a Hooked on Phonics cassette as they tried to salvage paperwork.
“We’re just trying to keep a smile on our faces,” said Jackie Ivy, an employee. “I cried all last night.”
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