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US-WEATHER-TORNADOES
Tornado kills 14 in US state of Alabama: officials
WASHINGTON, March 4, 2019 (BSS/AFP) – A tornado killed 14 people and caused
“catastrophic” damage in the southern US state of Alabama on Sunday, local
officials said.
“At this time, we have 14 confirmed fatalities,” Lee County Sheriff Jay
Jones said in a video posted on Facebook by a journalist from a local CBS
affiliate.
Other people have been hospitalized, some with “very serious injuries,”
while the search was still ongoing for more who are missing, he said.
Lee County coroner Bill Harris confirmed the death toll: “We’ve got 14
people dead at this time and I expect that number to go higher,” he told
MSNBC.
“There are some children involved,” Harris said.
The National Weather Service (NWS) office in Birmingham, Alabama tweeted
that it could confirm at least eight deaths in Lee County and added that the
toll was likely to rise, saying that there were “many injured & still
missing.”
Jones described the damage caused by the storm as “catastrophic, based on
the destruction of homes that we’ve seen.”
The swath of destruction left by the storm was a quarter mile (0.4
kilometers) wide and stretched for the “several miles that it traveled on the
ground,” according to Jones.
– Wrecked houses, downed trees –
Still and video images showed trees that had been snapped in two, debris-
strewn roads and wrecked houses in the wake of the storm.
More than 5,000 people were left without power in Lee County, according to
electricity outage tracker PowerOutage.US.
The NWS had issued a tornado warning for areas including Lee County earlier
on Sunday, calling on residents to: “TAKE COVER NOW! Move to a basement or an
interior room on the lowest floor of a sturdy building. Avoid windows.”
NWS Birmingham tweeted the “all clear” several hours later and urged people
to “stay out of damaged areas so first responders can do their job.”
While Jones referred to a single storm, CNN reported that two tornadoes had
hit Lee County in quick succession, some of “at least a dozen” is said tore
through Alabama and the neighboring state of Georgia on Sunday.
NWS Birmingham appeared to confirm that there were multiple twisters in the
area, tweeting that the “first tornado to impact Lee County today was at
least an EF-3 & at least 1/2 mi wide.”
The EF-3 designation — on a scale of 0 to 5 — means the tornado had winds
of 136 to 165 miles (218 to 266 kilometers) per hour.
BSS/AFP/MSY/0825 hrs