Fausset reported from Atlanta and Muskal from Los Angeles. Staff writer Ricardo Lopez in Los Angeles contributed to this report. BY RICHARD FAUSSET AND MICHAEL MUSKAL ADVERTISING LOS ANGELES TIMES ATLANTA — A wave of tornadoes swept through parts of
BY RICHARD FAUSSET
AND MICHAEL MUSKAL
LOS ANGELES TIMES
ATLANTA — A wave of tornadoes swept through parts of the South and Midwest on Friday, demolishing much of two small towns in southern Indiana where at least three people died during a second outbreak of deadly weather this week.
The three dead were all in Jefferson County in southern Indiana, said Emily Norcross, a spokeswoman for the state’s Department of Homeland Security. The towns of Henryville and Marysville, each with about 2,000 people, were extensively damaged, she said.
Throughout the day, the National Weather Service warned of rain, hail and the likelihood of tornadoes across as many as nine states, some of which had also been struck earlier in the week. Thirteen people died and more than 100 were injured as tornadoes began to hit Tuesday night.
Friday’s outbreak of tornadoes was “a one-in-20-year event,” said Angie Lese, a meteorologist with National Weather Service in Louisville, Ky., spawned by a combination of a cold front, high humidity and warm weather.
“We knew it was going to be bad. All the ingredients came together for a significant outbreak,” she said. “We will have more severe weather this season. This isn’t the last of it, I’m sure. But this is pretty rare.”
The extent of the devastation was unclear as rescuers rushed to areas of Indiana, especially Marysville, about 40 miles from Louisville. “That’s the information we have, that Marysville is no longer,” U.S. Sen. Dan Coats, R-Ind., said in an interview Friday afternoon with CNN.
Aerial television images from Henryville showed numerous wrecked houses, some with their roofs torn off and many surrounded by debris. Indiana Homeland Security spokesman John Erickson said a school had been hit by an apparent tornado and had lost much of its roof.
Other states — from Alabama to Indiana, and east from Tennessee and Kentucky — also reported apparent tornado strikes, according to the National Weather Service.
The Chattanooga and Knoxville areas of Tennessee were among those reporting damage and injuries, said Dean Flener, a spokesman for the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency. At least 20 homes were badly damaged and six people were hospitalized in the Chattanooga.
“We’ve had a wave of storms through East Tennessee with eight counties reporting possible tornadoes,” he said.
In Alabama, at least 10 injuries were reported in the Huntsville area, including Limestone and Madison counties.
“We have numerous homes with minor damage,” said Rita White, director of the Limestone County Emergency Management Agency. State officials said at least 40 homes were destroyed and 100 sustained major damage in the region.
Last year 350 homes were destroyed and nine people died in nearby Madison County, home of the space-flight research hub of Huntsville.
On Friday morning, Dale W. Strong, a 41-year-old Madison County commissioner, headed out to nearly the same tornado path, once again taking stock of the misery.
Strong said the apparent tornado that hit the community of Harvest, Ala., Friday morning didn’t seem to be as strong as the one that roared through the year before. But it was still ugly.
Numerous homes were destroyed in the tiny community, about 10 miles north of Huntsville. Some of the houses were damaged, and some were totaled. There were some injuries, but no reports of deaths.
The losses were too fresh to accurately tally, only to describe: Strong said sturdy concrete power poles 60 to 90 feet high had been toppled, with power lines draped across the road. Roofs were gone. Power was out.
Debris, he said, was “just strewn for miles.”
Sparkman High School appeared to have lucked out: Everything was more or less fine. But nearby, Strong said, “We did have 18-wheelers that were flipped upside-down.”
For Strong, who was trained as an emergency medical technician and still volunteers at the Fire Department in nearby Monrovia, the storm was an accepted fact of life in the stretch of country just south of the Tennessee border. In 1989, when Strong was a teenager, he was working on an ambulance when a November tornado tore up Airport Road in Huntsville, killing more than 20 people. The private ambulance company that employed him recognized his work that day with a medal of valor.
“I can tell you this right here: My family has lived in this community for eight generations, and it is hard to see your brothers and sisters that you go to church with, that you play baseball, basketball in our community parks with, to have to go through something like this,” Strong said.
But he also talked about what had worked Friday. This, he pointed out, was one particularly smart community. NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center is in Huntsville, along with numerous important aerospace research firms. Madison County is crawling with rocket scientists.
Its people are aware of the risks the weather brings, and they know what to do. The tornado warning system appeared to have worked well Friday, Strong said, with sirens giving residents fair warning before the touchdown, which he said occurred at about 9:30 or 9:45 a.m.
“We’re an engineering town,” he said. “People understand it comes with the territory.”
Fausset reported from Atlanta and Muskal from Los Angeles. Staff writer Ricardo Lopez in Los Angeles contributed to this report.
