Rescuers search for tornado victims
Crews looking for victims of a weekend tornado in Indiana finished searching the wreckage of a mobile home park and turned their attention today to draining a large pond where it was feared more bodies would be found.
The death toll stood at 21 from the tornado, which struck yesterday morning as people slept, making it the deadliest in Indiana in more than three decades.
Seventeen people died at Eastbrook Mobile Home Park, including some victims found in the pond, authorities said.
The search for victims and survivors broke off several hours after dark Sunday night. Vanderburgh County Sheriff Brad Ellsworth said the 6ft-deep pond nearby, where some victims were found, would be drained to determine whether it held any other bodies.
Knight Township Fire Chief Dale Naylor said he believed that all survivors or bodies left in the wreckage had otherwise been found.
Four others, including a woman who was eight months pregnant, died rom the tornado in neighbouring Warrick County, east of Evansville. More than 100 people were taken to hospitals. Ellsworth said authorities did not have a count of any people missing because so many had left the area on their own.
Authorities were not yet allowing residents to return to check on their homes as crews continued to clean up and check that utilities had been shut off. National Guard troops were called in to help with search-and-recovery efforts.
“Mother Nature picked the worst place to drop in a tornado,” Ellsworth said. “There’s not a safe place to escape to. You’re just up to fate at this point.”
The tornado struck a horse racing track near Henderson, Kentucky, then crossed into Indiana.
All the dead were in Indiana. The youngest victim at the trailer park was a two-year-old boy who was killed along with his 61-year-old grandmother, the Vanderburgh County coroner’s office said.
The deaths in Warrick County included Cheryl Warren – a dental assistant who was eight months pregnant – her four-year-old son, Isaac, and her husband, Jeremy, a truck driver. Authorities there also were counting as a fifth death the woman’s foetus.
Mobile home park resident Tim Martin, 42, said he and his parents were awakened by the wind, which lifted their home and moved it halfway into the neighbour’s garden.
They escaped unharmed, but he said they heard several neighbours calling for help. A neighbouring mobile home was overturned, he said, and another appeared to have been destroyed.
“All I could see was debris,” he said. “I thought it was a bad dream.”
Indiana homeland security spokeswoman Pam Bright said the tornado was the deadliest in Indiana since April 3, 1974, when 47 people were killed. Those storms were part of one of the worst tornado outbreaks in US history, which killed more than 300 in the South and Midwest and devastated Xenia, Ohio.
Ryan Presley, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, said the tornado appears to have been an F3 on the Fujita scale, with winds ranging from 158 mph to 206 mph. The scale ranges from F0, the weakest, to F5, the strongest.
