An 'enormous outbreak' of at least 91 tornadoes tore into the Ohio and Tennessee Valleys Friday, the second major tornado system to rake across the heartland in the span of three days.
Waves of tornado-bearing storms tore into America's heartland this week, laying waste to towns, prisons, churches, and trailer parks, and leaving authorities scrambling Saturday to reach hard-hit areas cut off by debris and downed trees.
Skip to next paragraphOn Friday, what the National Weather Service called an ?enormous outbreak? of up to 91 deadly twisters killed at least 31 people and put millions at risk as it rolled through the Ohio and Tennessee Valleys, destroying nearly the entire towns of Marysville, Ind. and Henryville, Ind., which both have a population of about 2,000, as the system spanned an area from the Gulf to the Great Lakes.
The weather service had issued 269 tornado warnings across the region by 10 p.m. Friday, compared to 189 warnings that were issued in the entire month of February.
"We are no match for Mother Nature at her worst," Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels said in a statement.
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As dawn broke on Saturday, rescue crews continued to search wide swaths of debris in several states, using rescue dogs and heat-detectors to look for survivors trapped in debris.
Many Kentucky towns remained cut off and searchers in Indiana spanned out across wide rural areas to assess damage and find possible survivors.?Of the 31 victims, 15 were in Indiana, 12 in Kentucky, three in Ohio and one in Alabama, but officials said the toll could be worse.
?We are going to continue to hit every county road that we know of that there are homes on and search those homes,? Indiana State Police Sgt. Jerry Goodin told the Associated Press. ?We have whole communities and whole neighborhoods that are completely gone. We?ve had a terrible, terrible tragedy here.?
The storm was unusual in and of itself, but what was called a one-in-20-year event was made more so by the fact that it came less than a year after a historic tornado outbreak on April 27, 2011, that left hundreds dead and billions in damage, mostly in Alabama.
Earlier this week, Greg Carbin, a forecaster with NOAA's Storm Forecasting Center in Norman, Okla., said the climatological odds were long that the country would see two extremely active tornado seasons in a row, although forecasters have predicted higher-than-usual numbers of twisters this year.
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