Blackouts, water shortages and desperate searches for the missing confronted tornado-battered residents of the central United States on Tuesday as the death toll rose to 40 from the most violent weather in four years.
Flooding in Tennessee stranded some residents and a fresh batch of severe storms struck parts of Missouri and Arkansas, adding to the misery.
The National Weather Service said there were apparently more than 80 separate tornadoes since Sunday in the hardest-hit states of Missouri, Tennessee and Kansas. The National Storm Prediction Center said reports of funnel sightings and damage had also come in from seven other states running from the Midwest into the South.
Missouri listed 18 deaths, Kansas seven and Tennessee 15, including four people killed while driving on flood-swept roads. Power blackouts were widespread and bottled water was being shipped into areas where supplies were contaminated or pumping equipment knocked out.
Hundreds of people were being housed in temporary shelters. For many victims, there was little personal property left to recover from flattened homes.
The Red Cross said more than 5,000 homes in five Midwestern states were damaged or destroyed.
Search and rescue efforts were still under way in Missouri and Tennessee from the killer tornadoes there on Sunday night and early Monday.
Thunderstorms packing tornadoes swept into central Missouri on Tuesday, sounding warning sirens in the capital of Jefferson City, emergency management spokesman Susie Stonner said.
"The heavy weather made everybody nervous" during the difficult cleanup of hard-hit Pierce City, Missouri, said David Rudduck of the Red Cross.
Truckloads of debris were carted away from Pierce City, a community of 1,400 about 150 miles south of Kansas City, where the downtown was reduced to rubble by a twister. House-by-house searches continued there for three missing people.
Damage in the metropolitan Kansas City area in Missouri and Kansas was estimated at US$20 million.
There were two people reported missing at Jackson, Tennessee, a town of 60,000 about 65 miles northeast of Memphis. The storms may have blown the two into a pond where a police search was concentrated.
Jackson was hit by a tornado in 1999 that killed six people. Among the structures damaged by the latest storm was a memorial to the victims of the earlier storm. Officials said the more recent storm caused damage much worse than the 1999 tornado, with nearly every building in the downtown section damaged in some fashion.
The violent weather was the worst of its kind since May 1999 when storms killed 46 in Oklahoma and Kansas. While high, the casualty toll was nowhere near the record for a US tornado outbreak set by storms of April 3 and 4 in 1974 that took 307 lives in 13 states.
In an average year, the United States records about 70 tornado deaths, but population growth and urbanization that has turned many rural areas into subdivisions put more people at risk from the storms each year.
(China Daily May 7, 2003)
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