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HAVOC LEAVES LITTLE HOPE

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By PETER WHORISKEY, The Washington Post

Published: February 7, 2008

CASTALIAN SPRINGS, Tenn. - The searchers had gone over the field once.

It seemed unlikely that anything else would turn up. It was dark and rainy. Amid the awesome wreckage of the tornado that had just passed they'd found three dead. Some bodies had been flung hundreds of feet from their homes, landing in tangles of branches and across the roadway.

Then they stumbled upon Kyson.

The 11-month-old, dressed in a T-shirt and diaper, was lying as silently as any other piece of debris in a field of tall grass about 100 yards from the now-leveled duplex where he had lived.

He was face down in the mud, covered in bits of grass like many of those who had been cast about by the dozens of tornadoes that had careened across the South.

"It's not a baby doll; it's alive," called out David Harmon, 31, an emergency worker from nearby Wilson County. He first had thought the boy was made of plastic.

Kyson, to the surprise of rescuers, had survived being tossed by winds that had not only flattened the brick post office next door but had killed his 23-year-old mother, throwing her several yards in the opposite direction, into some fallen trees.

"The baby was just shivering like this," said Keith Douglas, interim emergency medical services director for Sumner County, who was on the scene, putting his fists to his chest, pressing his elbows to his sides. "He was cold and scared and he had this blank look in his eyes."

The twister that flung Kyson from his home was among dozens that swept across the South on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, killing at least 55 people and leaving a huge swath of destruction. The winds caused millions of dollars in damage and injured more than 150 people in the nation's deadliest barrage of twisters in almost 23 years.

"We had a beautiful neighborhood. Now it's hell," said Bonnie Brawner, 80, who lives in Hartsville, a community about an hour from Nashville where a natural gas plant that was struck by a twister erupted in spectacular flames up to 400 feet high.

The storms flattened entire streets, smashed warehouses and sent tractor-trailers flying. Houses were reduced to splintered piles of lumber. Some looked like life-size dollhouses, their walls sheared away.

Crews going door to door to search for bodies had to contend with downed power lines, snapped trees and flipped cars. Cattle wandered through the debris near hard-hit Lafayette. At least 12 people died in and around the town.

"It looks like the Lord took a Brillo pad and scrubbed the ground," said Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen, who surveyed the damage from a helicopter.

President Bush gave assurances his administration stood ready to help. Teams from the Federal Emergency Management Agency were sent to the region and activated an emergency center in Georgia.

"Loss of life, loss of property; prayers can help, and so can the government," Bush said. "I do want the people in those states to know the American people are standing with them."

Bush is scheduled to travel to Tennessee on Friday to inspect the damage.

Students took cover in dormitory bathrooms as the storms closed in on Union University in Jackson, Tenn.

More than 20 students at the Southern Baptist school were trapped behind wreckage and jammed doors after the dormitories came down around them.

Danny Song was pinned for an hour and a half until rescuers dug him from the rubble.

"We looked up and saw the funnel coming in. We started running and then glass just exploded," he said.

"I hit the floor and a couch was shoved up against me, which may have saved my life because the roof fell on top of it."

With five minutes' warning from TV news reports, Nova and Ray Story huddled inside their home outside Lafayette and came out unscathed. But nearby, their uncle, Bill Clark, was injured in his toppled mobile home.

They put him in the bed of their pickup to take him to a hospital, and neighbors with chain saws tried to clear a path. What normally would have been a 30-minute drive to the hospital took more than two hours because the roads were clogged with debris. Clark died on the way.

"He never had a chance," Nova Story said. "I looked him right in the eye and he died right there in front of me."

Most communities had ample warning that the storms were coming. Forecasters had warned for days that severe weather was possible. The National Weather Service issued more than 1,000 tornado warnings from 3 p.m. Tuesday to 6 a.m. Wednesday in the 11-state area where the weather was heading.

The conditions for bad weather had lined up so perfectly that the Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Okla., put out an alert six days in advance.

While the weather was unusually severe, winter tornadoes are not uncommon. The peak tornado season is late winter through midsummer, but the storms can happen at any time of the year.

Near St. Vincent, Ark., Shannon Barnes said he, his mother and her husband took shelter in her basement. But the wind pulled the door open and nearly sucked them out.

"We prayed to Jesus. We prayed. That's why we're here," Barnes said.

After sowing destruction in the South, the storm system moved north, where it buried parts of Wisconsin, Iowa and Kansas under more than a foot of snow.

Information from The Associated Press was used in this report.

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