Alabama residents and rescue workers dug through the remnants of homes destroyed by a spate of tornadoes that killed at least 23 people.
At least two and as many as five tornadoes hit an area of eastern Alabama near the Georgia border in the space of a few hours on Sunday afternoon, with some of the worst damage in the tiny community of Beauregard, according to the National Weather Service.
Mobile homes were tossed on their sides and ripped open, their contents strewn on the ground, live television images showed. Pieces of homes hung from trees that were not flattened by the storm.
More than 50 people were reported injured and the death toll is expected to rise, authorities said, which could make the storms deadlier than the tornado that tore through Moore, Oklahoma, in 2013, killing 24 people.
„It looks almost as if someone took a giant knife and just scraped the ground. There are slabs where homes formerly stood, debris everywhere, trees are snapped,“ Lee County Sheriff Jay Jones told a morning news conference.
