ENGLISH     NYT1112CtornadoC
At Least 36 Dead in Aftermath of 66 Tornadoes
By DAVID M. HALBFINGER


MOSSY GROVE, Tenn., Nov. 11 EThe death toll reached 36 today after dozens of tornadoes sliced their 
way from Louisiana to Pennsylvania late Sunday, carving up farmland and forests and nearly erasing 
whole communities in Alabama, Tennessee and Ohio.

The National Weather Service said it was one of the worst November tornado outbreaks on record. 
Seventeen people died here in Tennessee, 12 in Alabama, 5 in Ohio and 1 each in Mississippi and 
Pennsylvania.

In Tennessee, Black Hawk helicopter crews and overwhelmed rescue workers on the ground continued 
to search for the dozens who remained unaccounted for. Tens of thousands of people in several 
states were still without power tonight.

The weather service had issued warnings beginning Saturday night after spotting a vast high-altitude
 cold front from Texas to New York, zooming east at 110 miles per hour, on a collision path with a 
broad, warm and moist air mass beneath it, drifting north from the Gulf of Mexico.

The resulting turbulence spawned at least 66 tornadoes along the storm front, officials said, 
a few registering a 3 out of 5 on the Fujita scale of tornado intensity, with winds between 158 
and 206 miles an hour. Many of those twisters remained on the ground for 15 to 20 miles at a time. 
One, in Walker County, Ala., where 10 people died, left a track 50 miles long, said Brian Peters, 
a meteorologist for the weather service in Birmingham.

"We saw places where there were just a few trees down, then we saw entire pine forests wiped out 
and laid down," Mr. Peters said today after surveying the damage. "We saw one chicken house with 
literally thousands of dead chickens sitting there. We saw mobile homes thrown into ponds."

The worst damage in Walker County was in Carbon Hill, where about a third of the town was destroyed 
after trees came crashing down on homes.

In Van Wert, Ohio, 2 people were killed. But 50 parents and children who had just seen the movie 
"The Santa Clause 2" were spared, when a theater manager heeded a tornado warning and ushered 
the audience to a structurally sound part of the building. The screening room they were in was 
destroyed.

Tornadoes are common in the spring but exceedingly rare in the fall, experts say. But Mark A. Rose, 
a meteorologist at the weather station in Nashville, said that unseasonably warm weather made all 
the difference: temperatures on Sunday reached a record 81 degrees, 20 degrees above normal. 
At least 18 tornadoes were counted in Tennessee, he said.

Mr. Rose said "baseball-sized" hailstones fell in Cumberland County, west of Morgan. "It takes 
a tremendous updraft to create that sort of hail, to hold it aloft long enough to create that 
size of hail," he said.

The worst recent tornado outbreak sent 70 twisters through Oklahoma and Kansas in May 1999, 
killing 44 people. But the most similar tornado swarm to Sunday's, weather officials said, 
struck from Nov. 21 to 23, 1992, when 94 tornadoes ripped across 13 states, killing 26 people 
and causing about $300 million in damage.

Tennessee, where at least 17 people were killed and 55 injured, was hardest hit this time.

In Coffee County, Art Bowman, the owner of a cluster of rented houses that were in the tornado's 
path, watched the funnel cloud approach from his back porch in Manchester. "This is bad," 
he remembered thinking. "This is going to get us. We're going to get hit.

"I heard a roar and the lightning was like a strobe light," he said. He watched the tornado 
pick up mobile homes and houses and flip an S.U.V. in the air like a nickel, then ran inside 
and got on top of his children in the bathtub. "I said, `Please God don't let this be happening,'
 and by the time I said `happening,' it was over."

Hobert Collins, 58, was driving through Georgia today when his wife told him by cellphone that 
their grandson, Hobert III, was missing. "She told me Lucille's house was gone and they couldn't 
find baby Hobert," he said, and he burst into tears.

"Them kids were my life," he said after racing back home. "That's all I got to live for."


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At Least 36 Dead in Aftermath of 66 Tornadoes
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In Morgan County, a boy and his grandfather were both killed and their parents remained in critical 
condition. Two other men were missing after their truck ran off the road. They had been deer hunting; 
the deer was found in the top of a tree, 500 feet away.

Here in Mossy Grove, a tiny hamlet 40 miles west of Knoxville, 5 people were killed, 23 were injured, 
and dozens more were left homeless and staggered by the destruction.

Officials said they had thought that the hilly topography would protect residents from high winds. 
But survivors said the tornado swept down over the hills about 8:30 p.m. It scoured a clean path 
several hundred yards wide through what had been a quiet, shady neighborhood of mobile homes and 
brick ranches.

Only a few houses had basements, and when the winds started howling, Susan Henry and her husband 
ran with their son and daughter down the hill to a neighbor's house, where both families took 
shelter downstairs. Minutes later, she said, a Jeep and a car came crashing into the side of 
the house, toppling a wall on top of her daughter Tabitha, 17.

The house above them began to peel away, Tabitha said, and when the wind began to suck her 
little brother up into its vortex, she and her parents stopped praying and screaming and 
grabbed 9-year-old Justin in midair by the ankles. The tornado had already taken his shoes.

"My mom had him, so my dad and myself grabbed a hold of my mom," said Tabitha, limping 
today among the splinters of furniture, muddy shreds of unrecognizable clothes and 
incongruously intact pickle jars in the heap that used to be her home. She wore a borrowed 
sweatsuit; the wind had stripped her clothes off.

The Henry family held onto one another, and survived. Others could not. 

Russell Hines ran out of his trailer to check on his family a short drive away but never made it 
into his vehicle.

Tracy Goode and her two baby girls were riding with her father in his Chevy Blazer; the red Blazer 
wound up in a swampy cow pasture 300 yards from the nearest road. Her 4-month-old daughter was
 killed, but the 2-year-old survived.

Mike Williams, 26, picked over the ruins where his father had lived with his girlfriend. The couple 
were killed inside. Nearby, Mr. Williams's ailing grandmother was killed and his mother, who had 
been caring for her, was critically injured when their house, too, was obliterated.

Mr. Williams, who worked alongside his father as a guard at the state prison near here, was a bundle
 of motion this afternoon, stacking magazines no one would ever read again and gathering his father's 
old paychecks. "I'm just trying to keep going," he said. "I don't even know where to start."

He had been in Lansing, 20 miles away, when he heard the tornado warning, he said. "I called my 
grandmother's house at 8:29," Mr. Williams said. "My mom was watching her, so I told her to get in 
the basement." He called his father's house next, but the line was already dead.

Even the biggest church in town, the barn-sized New Life Apostolic, was left uninhabitable, 
its tin walls and roof crumpled in and bent back like a soda can, its yellow insulation now 
blossoming on the few trees that remained in its backyard.

On the other side of the tornado's track, a sign at the Fellowship Baptist Church, which bore 
witness from the edge the destruction but was somehow untouched, still carried its now-empty 
promise: "Revival ENov. 11-15."


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