‘The windows exploded’: Storm death toll rises to 20 in South

Associated Press

ALBANY, GA.

A tornado warning on TV sent Anthony Mitchell, his pregnant wife and their three children scrambling for what little shelter their mobile home could provide. They crouched in a hallway as the twister started taking their home apart piece by piece.

“The windows exploded, the doors flew off the hinges, the sheetrock started to rip off the walls and fly out the windows,” Mitchell said. “The trailer started to lift up. And about that time a tree fell on the trailer, and I think that’s what held the trailer in place from flying away.”

An unusual midwinter barrage of tornadoes and thunderstorms over the weekend was blamed for at least 20 deaths across the Deep South. Among them were three people killed at Big Pine Estates, the mobile home park in Albany where the Williams family lives.

A twister slammed into the southwestern Georgia city of 76,000 people Sunday afternoon, carving a path of destruction a half-mile wide in places and leaving the landscape strewn with broken trees and mangled sheet metal. Few of the roughly 200 homes at the trailer park escaped damage from the tornado, which was rated by forecasters as at least an EF-2, meaning it packed winds of 111 to 135 mph.

In addition to the three dead at Big Pine Estates, a fourth body was discovered at a home just outside the trailer park.

Mitchell lost his home and marveled that he didn’t lose his life, too.

“Something helped us walk out the front door of the house,” he said. “There’s some people who weren’t fortunate enough to have a front door to walk out of.”

Georgia reported 15 deaths Sunday, and four people died Saturday in Mississippi. In northern Florida, a woman died after a tree crashed into her home in Lake City as a storm passed through.

The National Weather Service said 39 possible tornadoes were reported over the weekend.

A day after the violent weather passed, search crews looked for people and pets in the Albany trailer park, stepping over tree limbs and ducking under splintered pine trunks as they went from home to home. One team discovered a terrified dog in a smashed-in trailer, where it had spent the night. Authorities said the pet owner’s fate was unknown.