MOSSY GROVE, Tenn. - Dazed residents of Tennessee, Alabama and Ohio spent yesterday picking through vast piles of rubble, looking for friends, for belongings, for anything familiar after about 70 tornadoes, a few of them extraordinarily powerful, cut a broad swath of wreckage across the South and Midwest over the weekend.
At least 36 people died in the storms and hundreds were injured. Scores of houses were obliterated, several manufacturing plants were destroyed, and uncounted cars, trucks and trailers were lifted, twisted and hurled into the raging funnel clouds that pulverized whole communities.
The band of tornadoes and accompanying thunderstorms stretched from Pennsylvania to Louisiana. They swept across the region in waves, from late Saturday to late Sunday, catching victims as they drove home from church, as they huddled in their basements and as they tracked radar images of the violent weather on TV.
The death toll included 17 victims in Tennessee, 12 in Alabama, five in Ohio and one each in Pennsylvania and Mississippi. Scores were still unaccounted for late yesterday - though no one could say whether they were buried under homes or simply unable to communicate because of downed phone lines.
"We want the prayers of everyone in the country," Tennessee Gov. Don Sundquist said.
Touring the devastation by helicopter on a tauntingly sunny morning, Sundquist said the twister that nailed the mountain community of Mossy Grove on Sunday may well have been an F5 - the most severe classification on the Fujita scale. Such storms can pack winds topping 300 mph, though they account for just 1 percent of the roughly 1,000 tornadoes that hit the United States each year.
At least seven people were killed in the tiny community 40 miles northwest of Knoxville, including 73-year-old Marjie Williams and her son Michael, 47, who lived side by side in homes that the wind ripped to splinters in the roaring confusion of the night.
'Hard to believe'
An exhausted James Williams - Marjie's son, Michael's brother - searched the wreckage yesterday afternoon, drawing on a cigarette. He set aside papers that looked important. He scavenged the block for his brother's prized gun collection. "Hard to believe," he mumbled. "Unreal." He found an old-fashioned wooden telephone booth his brother had restored. It was about the only intact item in what was left of the house.
"I wish he could have gotten inside this," Williams said, staring at the booth. "He might have made it."
Nearby, Tammy Pennington was looking for her kitchen.
The rest of her trailer home she had found, more or less. Scraps of the frame were dangling from a tree. Other shards were strewn about a muddy field. She had even tracked down her sofa, her treadmill, her linoleum floor - or rather, their shredded remains. The kitchen, though, was gone.
Then a neighbor came by and said she had spotted it an eighth of a mile down the road, plunked in a pasture, surrounded by grazing cows and drifting tufts of yellow insulation.
One question answered. Too many more, achingly unresolved.
A few hundred miles north, in Van Wert, Ohio, authorities said the multiple funnel clouds that raked the farm country near the Indiana border may have rated F4, with winds of up to 260 mph. The storm killed two people there, demolished at least 26 homes and destroyed several industrial plants, leaving up to 500 workers jobless, said Hugh Saunier, a spokesman for the county Emergency Management Agency.
It could have been a lot worse. In northwestern Ohio's farm country, two twisters split into four Sunday outside Van Wert, cutting a 100-mile swath of destruction.
One of those twisters hurled three cars into a theater that had just been filled with moviegoers watching The Santa Clause 2.
An early tornado warning led the manager to move the 50 movie patrons into the Twin Cinema's structurally sound areas, the only ones that weren't destroyed after Sunday's storms. Nobody in the theater was injured.
Emergency officials credited the theater manager, Scott Shaffer, with saving lives.
"It could have been a real tragedy," said Jack Snyder, spokesman for Van Wert County Emergency Management Agency. "We consider ourselves very lucky."
Said Shaffer: "For a few seconds, it got ear-piercing. I was too scared to panic."
Theater owner Jim Boyd, whose house next door to the theater also was destroyed, said yesterday: "The Lord was looking out for us and our customers."
"Our entire life went away in a matter of five minutes," said Boyd, who was a mile away visiting his mother when the tornado hit. "But we're alive and we're extremely lucky,"
Liz Hoersten huddled with her mother, daughter and other moviegoers in one of the theaters when the tornado hit. "The walls shook, the floors shook. We heard the noise as it went over," said Hoersten, 43.
"We got up to go to try to leave. We walked into the lobby [and]saw the damage," she said yesterday. "Someone said there was another one coming. We went right back where we came from, and we huddled together again."
Yesterday morning, the lobby and front of the theater were all that appeared intact. Two arcade games and a popcorn machine still stood.
The rest was torn away or collapsed. Rows of blue-cushioned seats - littered with wood and plaster - sat open to the sky, and two wrecked cars came to rest where The Santa Clause 2 had been showing, one in the front-row of seats, the other where the screen had been.
Rick McCoy, county Emergency Management Agency director, had activated the countywide tornado sirens and urged people to move to safe places.
"They had 28 minutes ... where the management moved all the children and their families into the center cinderblock portion of this facility, and that's withstood," McCoy said on NBC's Today show. "The rest of the cinema is gone."
Warning sirens
Similar stories of close calls echoed in the makeshift shelters set up in churches, civic centers and schools in several states. Indeed, many people managed to escape serious injury thanks in part to warning sirens. As in Van Wert, alarms in some places began sounding up to a half-hour before the worst winds hit.
"We're doing much better at forecasting and warning," said Chuck Doswell, a tornado expert with the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Okla.
Doswell recalled a similar band of storms stretching from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico in April 1974 - a system that killed 10 times as many people. In May 1999, another swarm of 70-plus tornadoes - including some rated F5 - killed 44 people in Oklahoma and Kansas.
Weather cliche
The weekend's fierce weather can be blamed, Doswell said, on the "cliche of clashing air masses." The weather was unseasonably warm in much of the Midwest and South - up to 80 degrees and humid. But cold air rushing down from Canada in the upper atmosphere created instability. The inevitable clash set up powerful, whirling storms that dropped golf ball-sized hail on some towns and funnel clouds on others.
Though the traditional tornado season is spring, meteorologists said autumn twisters are fairly common across the South and Midwest.
Ken Ellingwood and Stephanie Simon write for the Los Angeles Times, a Tribune Publishing Co. newspaper. The Associated Press contributed to this article.