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ADEL / AP
A vast storm system that kicked up apparent tornadoes, shredded mobile homes and left other destruction scattered around the Southeast has claimed at least 19 lives during its two-day assault on the region.
Authorities said on Monday at least 15 deaths occurred in south Georgia alone, including seven from an apparent winter twister that tore through a trailer park before dawn on Sunday. Authorities reported four deaths on Saturday in Mississippi as the storm system ramped up. It was so big parts of it threatened the Carolinas and north Florida. In southwest Georgia, Bridget Simmons along with her parents, her daughter and her grandson were in their brick home in the city of Albany when the sky got dark Sunday afternoon and the wind began to howl.
“I was in the den and I heard that loud roar and I grabbed the baby and I said, ‘Let’s go guys. This is it.’ We laid down and that was it.” The wind was so loud, she added, “you could hear it beating back and forth.”
Minutes later, their home was largely unscathed, save for a carport that collapsed atop two cars. But trees were down all around, police sirens wailed and authorities would add four more deaths for an overall count of at least 19. Dougherty County Coroner Michael Fowler said early Monday that a total of four people died in the county that includes Albany on Sunday, increasing the total in south Georgia to 15.
Some 60 miles away from Simmons’ home, Coroner Tim Purvis in south Georgia’s Cook County confirmed seven people died at the mobile home park in the rural community of Adel, where about half of the 40 homes were leveled. Debris lay about not far from mobile homes largely untouched but emptied of survivors and cordoned off by police. Elsewhere, shredded siding from mobile homes, a house stripped of exterior walls but left standing, even a piano blown outdoors, all bore evidence of the power of the powerful storms system that tore across the Deep South.
The 15 killed in south Georgia included two deaths each in the counties of Berrien and Brooks.
In South Carolina, the National Weather Service has confirmed that two tornadoes struck over the weekend, injuring one woman who was trapped in a mobile home that was damaged near Blackville. The weather service says a tornado touched down about 3:45 p.m. Saturday in Barnwell County and moved into Bamberg County. The other occurred in Orangeburg County a few minutes later.
Weather experts say tornadoes can hit any time of year in the South — including in the dead of winter. Even north Florida was under the weekend weather threat. While the central US has a fairly defined tornado season the risk of tornadoes “never really goes to zero” for most of the year in the Southeast, explained Patrick Marsh of the Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma. He said 39 possible tornadoes were reported across the Southeast from early Saturday into Sunday evening — none immediately confirmed. Of that, 30 were reported in Georgia, four in Mississippi, and one each in Louisiana and South Carolina.
January tornado outbreaks are rare but not unprecedented, particularly in the South. Data from the Storm Prediction Center shows that, over the past decade, the nation has seen an average of 38 tornadoes in January, ranging from a high of 84 in 2008 to just four in 2014.