ENGLISH     NYT1112tornado


  In Alabama, an Ailing Town Takes Another Knock
By ROBERT DEWITT with JERRY GRAY


ARBON HILL, Ala., Nov. 11 EDessie Woods was heading home from church late Sunday when she said she 
heard the tornado approaching.

"When it came up, I left," Mrs. Woods said today. "I can run, baby, I was moving."

Mrs. Woods, who is in her 50's, escaped unharmed, but her small, hilly town in Walker County, 
in northern Alabama, was devastated by at least two and possibly three powerful twisters. 
Officials said at least nine people had been killed in Walker County, about 70 miles northwest 
of Birmingham, and one in Cherokee County, in northeast Alabama.

According to witnesses, at least two tornados Eone behind the other Ecut through the western 
end of the downtown area, first hitting a lumber yard, scooping up lumber and tin.

The funnel clouds then bore down on the main street of this town of 2,100 people, dumping a small 
mountain of lumber and tin on the lawn of City Hall, clawing the roof from the old town hall building, 
wrecking Carbon Hill Elementary School and toppling dozens of huge oak trees, some of which had stood 
for 80 to 100 years.

The twisters were part of a storm system that raked more than a dozen states from the Gulf of Mexico 
to the Great Lakes, killing at least 33 people, leaving hundreds more missing and injured and laying 
waste to communities. Tennessee and Alabama appeared to be hardest hit, with at least 26 dead between 
them and untold numbers hurt and missing.

Sheryl Wakefield told The Associated Press that her 72-year-old sister, Audrey Alexander, and Mrs. 
Alexander's daughter, Susan, were killed when the tornados hit their doublewide mobile home here. 
Their bodies were found in the wreckage of the mobile home, whose metal frame was found twisted 
around a broken tree.

"It took a long time for them to find them," she said.

The deputy coroner for Walker County, Bob Green, told The A.P. after viewing the bodies of two 
women found beside a road that "Carbon Hill had a bad time."

Founded in the late 1880's, Carbon Hill in its heyday depended on coal mining and railroading 
for its principal livelihood, but the mines played out long ago and the town has since slipped 
into economic depression. 

As soon as the sun rose today, residents emerged to survey the damage, which stretched from one 
end of town to the other.

"There are trees down everywhere," Howard Graham said as he walked through the west end of town, 
where the storm began its destructive march. Then, gesturing toward a residential area, he added, 
"A lot of the houses over there are completely demolished."

Across town, Stephen Rozzell, Mrs. Woods's brother-in-law, had just returned to what was left of 
his house. "We don't know yet what we're going to do," he said. "Tomorrow we are going to apply 
for emergency housing."

Emergency and relief officials began arriving after daybreak. David Nash, a Birmingham psychologist 
who performs volunteer work for the Red Cross, was in the first wave and mindful of what to expect.

"It's early in the disaster, and people are being strong," he said. "It's later that the emotional 
problems come."