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| Amos Calloway, Steve Burnett and his wife Rhonda Burnett after a tornado ripped through their welding business outside New Pekin, Indiana |
Tornadoes sweeping across the US midwest and south have flattened small towns and left at least 29 dead, with many more missing. A wave of twisters in Indiana, Ohio and Kentucky crushed entire blocks of homes, ripped up power lines, tossed cars and school buses from the road and destroyed schools. Early on Saturday morning rescuers were beginning to search for missing residents and authorities warned that many more people could be dead.
The death toll stood at 12 in Kentucky, and tornadoes were reported in at least six Ohio cities and towns, including the village of Moscow, where at least three people were killed. A total of 14 people were reported killed in Indiana, including four in the town of Chelsea, where a man, a woman and a child aged four, died in one house. Authorities in Indiana on Friday night searched dark county roads connecting rural communities that officials said "are completely gone".
Describing the devastation in one small town in Indiana, Clark County Sheriff Chuck Adams, said: "Marysville is completely gone." Henryville, Indiana, a town of about 2,000 people and most famous as the birthplace of KFC founder Colonel Harland Sanders, was badly hit. Aerial footage from a TV news helicopter showed wrecked houses and a mangled school bus protruding from the side of a building. Hundreds of firefighters and police moved around the town where few buildings were left standing.
"It's all gone," resident Andy Bell said. "It was beautiful. And now it's just gone. I mean, gone."
Susie Renner, 54, said she saw two tornadoes bearing down on Henryville within minutes of each other. The first was brown from being filled with debris; the second was black. "I'm a storm chaser and I have never been this frightened before," she said. The tornadoes, which swept northwards from the gulf coast, came two days after another round of thunderstorms killed 13 people in the midwest and south.
Forecasters at the National Weather Service's storm prediction centre said then that the day would be one of a handful this year that warranted its highest risk warning. But by 10pm on Friday, the weather service had issued 269 tornado warnings. Only 189 warnings were issued in all of February.
"We knew this was coming. We were watching the weather like everyone else," said Clark County Sheriff Danny Rodden. "This was the worst case scenario. There's no way you can prepare for something like this."