USA: Tornadoes rip through southern and midwestern U.S., killing at least 14 people
- 00:00:11
- ITN Source
USA: Tornadoes rip through southern and midwestern U.S., killing at least 14 people
Tornadoes ripped across the Southern and Midwestern United States, killing at least 14 people including eight in the southern Alabama town of Enterprise, emergency management officials said. Tornadoes ripped across the Southern and Midwestern United States on Thursday (March 1, 2007), killing at least 14 people including eight in the southern Alabama town of Enterprise, emergency management officials said. The victims in Enterprise died when a twister caused part of a high school to collapse, and five people were killed elsewhere across Alabama, officials said. Another death was reported in Missouri. The Montgomery Advertiser newspaper said state emergency managers were asked to send a "mass fatality" recovery team to Enterprise in Alabama's Coffee County. "The tornado came through and the roof came down on us. Luckily it was built out of cinder blocks, so the walls held up. A lot of the exterior bricks came in and hit some of the people around us." Television news footage showed helicopters landing near wreckage of the school while ambulances came and went. A wall had collapsed and the building, part of its roof blown off, was surrounded with broken trees." said Caleb Westley, a high school student at Enterprise High School who was lucky enough to ride through the storm without injury. Nearby residential neighbourhoods suffered damage from the tornado as well. Emergency officials told local television that at least one teacher was among those killed at the school. CNN quoted an eyewitness as saying he carried the bodies of two young girls out of the building. State officials sent search and rescue teams, ambulances, generators and emergency lights to aid the search for survivors. In the town of Caulfield in south-central Missouri, a tornado killed a girl in a mobile home and damaged six other homes and two gasoline stations, officials said. Parts of several Midwestern states and regions as far south as the Gulf Coast to the Florida Panhandle had been under tornado watches or warnings most of the day.
ITN Source | March 2, 2007
