Tornado leaves 26 dead

Layer by layer and piece by piece, Franklin County residents are digging through the rubble and debris of the county’s worst natural disaster in history.

Wednesday’s massive EF-4 tornado carved out a 12-mile path across the county, killing 26 people and wreaking havoc as it left mounds of carnage and disaster in its wake.

“I could have never dreamed of anything like this,” Phil Campbell Police Sgt. Terrell Potter said Friday.

“It’s unimaginable.”

Moments after Wednesday’s monstrous storm, residents wandered aimlessly through the streets of Phil Campbell, many asking for help finding loved ones, while others sought medical help for themselves.

“I can’t find anybody,” one woman cried as she fell into another woman’s arms.

“Everybody is gone.”

Another man, driving a four-wheeler, pulled up to a crowd standing on the First Baptist Church steps and said that his entire family was gone.

He stopped long enough to choke back tears, then said, “I lost them all.”

Resident after resident shared stories of how they hid in closets, underneath beds and even in bathtubs, just to finally raise their heads and find nothing left.

Entire neighborhoods, including the Phil Campbell Housing Authority, were completely leveled.

Throughout town, power poles and trees that had been snapped like twigs littered the ground as pieces of tin blew in the wind.

Two more tornado warnings were issued Wednesday afternoon in the hours following the killer storm. Nervous residents looked to hide behind anything they could as stiff winds blew debris through the air.

Business owners and cit leaders walked through town astounded at the site in front of them. School officials quickly examined damage at the high school, which suffered extensively, while the elementary school was spared.

Phil Campbell resident Brian Isom said he was making his way to the storm shelter at First Baptist Church when the tornado tried lifting him away as he got out of his van.

“It was slinging us all over the place,” he said.

Though Isom made it safely out of the storm’s grasp, dozens more were not so fortunate.

In some instances entire families were lost, while hundreds more were injured and transported to area hospitals.

Paramedics and emergency personnel across northwest Alabama rushed to the areas hardest hit in the moments following the killer storm. Rescue crews even used pick-up truck beds to carry the injured to the Phil Campbell Rescue Squad, which was set up as a triage area used to treat the injured.

Patients were rushed to Russellville Hospital, Lakeland Community Hospital in Haleyville, Red Bay Hospital, Shoals Hospital, Helen Keller and Eliza Coffee Memorial hospitals.

The East Franklin and Oak Grove communities were hit especially hard as well.

Nearby Hackleburg was almost completely destroyed, with an official death toll placed at 21.

The deadly series of storms that passed into the region Wednesday created tornadoes throughout the Southeast, but Alabama was hit particularly hard.

The Alabama Emergency Management Agency reported Friday that 228 people died in Alabama tornadoes alone Wednesday, with Tuscaloosa, Franklin, Marion and Dekalb counties suffering the most fatalities.

During a visit to Tuscaloosa on Friday, President Barrack Obama said that he had “never seen devastation like this.”

The storm claimed the lives of elderly parents and their children, young couples with small children and spouses.

Among the dead were elementary school students, a teacher, a former city councilman and countless others.

Phil Campbell resident Chris Frost said there were parts of town that he could no longer recognize.

“There are houses down everywhere,” he said. “I walked through parts of town and I am not even sure where I was at.”

Obama declared a federal state of emergency throughout the state Friday and promised quick aid to assist in the recovery efforts.

State Sen. Roger Bedford said the federal aid money would allow clean-up work to take place much quicker.

“It will allow us to move forward with the recovery efforts and will aid families who are hurting so much right now,” he said.

For the time being, however, there is little aid that can help the hurting.

“It will be a long time before things are the same,” Frost said.

“If it’s ever the same.”