Selma, Alabama: A massive storm system whipped up gusty winds and tornadoes cut a path across the US South, killing at least seven people in Georgia and Alabama, where a tornado damaged buildings and Tossed cars on the streets of historic downtown Selma.
Officials said a clearer picture of the extent of the damage and the search for additional victims would come on Friday, when the situation was expected to clear up. After the storm subsided on Thursday night, thousands of customers were without power in both states.
In Selma, a city steeped in the history of the civil rights movement, the city council used lights from cellphones as they held a meeting on the sidewalk to declare a state of emergency.
Six deaths were reported in Autauga County, Alabama, 41 miles (66 km) northeast of Selma, where an estimated 40 homes were damaged or destroyed by a tornado that tore a 20-mile (32-km) trail into two rural communities. cut the way said Ernie Baggett, the county’s emergency management director.
Baggett told The Associated Press that at least 12 people were seriously injured and taken to hospitals by emergency responders. He said crews were focused on clearing downed trees Thursday night to search for people who needed help.
“It’s the worst I’ve seen here in this county,” Baggett said of the damage.
Butts County Coroner Lacey Prue said a passenger was killed when a tree fell on a vehicle in Jackson, Georgia. In the same county southeast of Atlanta, storms derailed a freight train, officials said.
Authorities in Griffin, south of Atlanta, told local news outlets that several people were trapped after a tree fell on an apartment complex. The roof of a Hobby Lobby store partially collapsed in the city, while elsewhere in the city firefighters cut loose a man who was trapped for hours under a tree that fell on his home. Curfew was imposed in the city from 10 pm on Thursday till 6 am on Friday.
Nationwide, there were 33 separate tornado reports from the National Weather Service on Thursday, and Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, South Carolina and North Carolina all saw tornado warnings for a time. Reports of tornadoes are yet to be confirmed and some of them may be classified as wind damage after further assessment in the coming days.
The tornado that hit Selma cut a wide path through the downtown area, where brick buildings collapsed, oak trees were uprooted, cars were on their sides and power lines were down. Thick, black smoke billowed from the burning fire over the city. It was not immediately known whether the storm caused the fire.
Selma Mayor James Perkins said no one was reported dead, but several people were seriously injured. First responders were continuing to assess the damage and officials were expected to see an aerial view of the city on Friday morning.
He said that many electric wires have fallen here. “There is too much danger on the roads.”
Mattie Moore was among the Selma residents who picked up boxed food offered by a charity downtown.
“Thank God we’re here. It’s like something you see on TV,” Moore said of all the destruction.
A city of about 18,000 people, Selma is about 50 miles (80 kilometers) west of Montgomery, the Alabama capital. It was a flashpoint of the civil rights movement and where Alabama state troopers viciously attacked black people advocating for voting rights as they marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7, 1965.
Maleesha McVay took video of the giant twister, which would black out as it swept through house after house.
“It will hit a house, and black smoke will go up,” he said. “It was awful.”
About 40,000 customers were without power in Alabama Thursday night, according to PowerOutage.us, which tracks outages nationwide. In Georgia, about 86,000 customers were without power after the storm system made its way across a tier of counties just south of Atlanta.
School systems in at least six Georgia counties canceled classes on Friday. Those systems enroll a total of 90,000 students.
In Kentucky, the National Weather Service in Louisville confirmed that an EF-1 tornado struck Mercer County and said crews were surveying damage in a handful of other counties.
Three factors — a natural La Niña weather cycle, a warming of the Gulf of Mexico likely related to climate change and a decade-long shift in the number of tornadoes from west to east — combined to make Thursday’s tornado outbreak unusual and damaging. came along, said Victor Gencini, a meteorology professor at Northern Illinois University who studies tornado trends.
La Niña, the cooling of parts of the Pacific that changes weather around the world, was a factor in creating the wavy jet stream that brought through the cold front, Gencini said. But this is not enough for a tornado outbreak. What is needed is moisture.
Normally the air in the Southeast is fairly dry at this time of year but dew points were twice as high as normal, possibly due to unusually warm waters in the Gulf of Mexico, which is likely to be affected by climate change. Gencini said that moisture came in over the cold front and all was well.