Search-and-rescue workers raced on Monday to help the rural Alabama communities that had been ravaged by tornadoes. Officials said they expected the death toll to rise.
BEAUREGARD, Ala. — As search-and-rescue workers raced on Monday to help the rural Alabama communities that had been ravaged by tornadoes, officials said that at least three children were among the 23 people killed by the storms.
Houses lay shredded and entire neighborhoods flattened in the wake of Sunday’s storms in Lee County, Ala., where the deaths occurred. Sheriff Jay Jones of Lee County said it was as if someone “took a giant knife and just scraped the ground.”
Sheriff Jones said that several people were still unaccounted for, and that crews were sorting through the debris in hopes of finding survivors.
Bill Harris, the Lee County coroner, said the three children among the dead were a 6-year-old, a 9-year-old who died at the hospital and a 10-year-old. He said he had been told that in at least one case multiple members of the same family had died.
Here are the latest developments:
• Sheriff Jones said on Monday afternoon that the death toll remained at 23, with no new victims found since Sunday.. Several people — a number in the double digits — were still unaccounted for, he said, without giving the exact figure.
• Dozens of people were sent to hospitals on Sunday with injuries, with at least two in intensive care.
• The National Weather Service said Monday that it believed the tornado that raced through Lee County had been an EF-4 storm, with winds of 170 miles an hour.
• Chris Darden, the meteorologist-in-charge for the weather service’s Birmingham office, said the track of the “monster tornado” appeared to have been at least 24 miles long, and that the storm had been nearly a mile wide.
• Gov. Kay Ivey of Alabama said she had spoken with President Trump and received assurances of federal support.
Taylor Thornton, 10, had been camping with her best friend for several days and was at the friend’s father’s mobile home in Beauregard when the storm hit on Sunday.
Taylor’s mother, Ashley Thornton, said in a telephone interview that she got a call around 2 p.m. Sunday from the friend’s mother, who is divorced from the father. The mother had no luck reaching the father by phone; could Ms. Thornton try?
When she couldn’t get through either, her husband, David Thornton, drove toward the home, and then got out and walked when snapped trees blocked the way. When he arrived, “there was no house left,” he told his wife by phone; he recognized the place only by a motorcycle parked outside.
Ms. Thornton said her husband persuaded a sheriff’s deputy to let him onto the property, where he saw Taylor’s body. The deputy let him carry her to a waiting vehicle.
“The few times I’ve talked to him, all he’s told me was that she looked like she was sleeping,” Ms. Thornton said. When the identity of the body was confirmed, she said, family and friends “just kind of crumbled.”
As of Monday afternoon, Ms. Thornton said, she had not been told exactly how Taylor died, other than that “the tornado had gone through and destroyed everything.”
Ms. Thornton said her daughter was a smiling, well-behaved girl who loved horses and God and spending time with her best friend.
