CNN –
The severe weather outbreak that spawned more than two dozen tornadoes in the South has led to multiple deaths in Autauga County, Alabama, the coroner said Thursday evening.
“We have multiple deaths and we’re still looking for bodies,” Autauga County Coroner Buster Barber said.
Autauga County is east of Dallas County, where a large tornado ripped through the city of Selma Thursday afternoon. The twister was likely on land for at least 50 miles and caused damage in seven counties in the state, National Weather Service meteorologist Gerald Satterwhite told CNN.
“It was a pretty significant tornado” with “debris lifted into the air about 10,000 to 15,000 feet,” Satterwhite said.
The long-track tornado was likely an EF-2 or EF-3, he added. It was one of at least 30 tornadoes in the United States, according to the National Weather Service’s Storm Prediction Center.
The damage in Selma is widespread, said Dallas County Coroner William Alan Dailey, who is also an EMT. The damage goes “from one side of Dallas County to the other,” he said during a video news conference.
He said there were no deaths but injured people were being taken to Vaughan Regional Hospital.
What appeared to be a huge funnel cloud passed over the area, according to images shared by Mike Pitts. After Pitts passed, footage showed homes without roofs, other roofs torn from shingles and roads blocked by piles of debris.
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Selma resident Krishun Moore’s home was “destroyed” by the storm, but no one was hurt, he told CNN. He took refuge in a bathroom with his mother.
“All we heard was wind and the whole house was shaking,” Moore said.
Photos Priscilla Lewis shared with CNN show downed power poles, debris strewn across the road and severe damage to at least one building.
“It’s almost impossible to get out of downtown Selma,” Lewis said.
Other photos, taken by Kenneth Martin, show the wind damage. One shows a large building with what appears to be a major roof collapse.
Deborah A. Brown told CNN she was at a tax office downtown when what she believes was the tornado touched down on Broad Street.
In a Facebook video posted after the storm, Brown can be heard telling people how blessed she and others were.
“We could have gone, all of us,” he says as he points the camera at an SUV with broken windows. “We had to run for cover. We had to run and jump into the closet.”
Brown’s video shows a large pile of debris dragging power lines down to the ground. In the alley next to the building he was in, part of a wall from the structure next door appears to have collapsed in a heap.
Selma, a city of about 17,000 people about 50 miles west of Montgomery, is the site of a historic 1965 civil rights march in which police beat and tear-gassed protesters on the Edmund Bridge Pettus, an incident called “Bloody Sunday”. .”
“This is a disaster area. Power lines are down and trees are down, this is really dangerous,” Dallas County Probate Judge Jimmy Nunn said during the news conference. Nunn said inmates in county detention centers were being sent to other facilities.
Even as of Thursday evening, tornado watches covered parts of Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, the western Florida Panhandle and far western North Carolina with multiple expirations.
More than 147,000 customers in Alabama, Georgia and Tennessee were without power as of 7:30 p.m. ET, according to PowerOutage.us.
The governors of Alabama and Georgia each issued a state of emergency for parts of their states.
Damage reports in the Southeast and Ohio Valley piled up Thursday as the storms moved through.
In north Alabama’s Morgan County alone, a storm caused 10 to 15 injuries Thursday morning, none believed to be life-threatening, and damaged numerous buildings, the county sheriff’s spokesman said. Mike Swafford.
Streets and fields were littered with debris and downed power lines in Decatur, a Morgan County community about 25 miles southwest of Huntsville, images from city police and the county sheriff’s department showed.
Siding was ripped from a Decatur hotel, according to footage taken by hotel guest Mark Spychala, who said he took shelter in a laundry room when the storm hit Thursday morning.
“We lost power and we could hear the wind and the rain” hitting the area outside, Spychala told CNN. The National Weather Service preliminarily attributed Decatur’s damage to high winds.
There were several preliminary reports of tornadoes in Alabama this morning, including in northwest Alabama’s Winston County and west Alabama’s Sumter County, where building damage was reported, say the weather service.
Downed trees and power lines were reported along several roads in Winston County, whose communities are dozens of miles northwest of Birmingham.
“Motorists are urged to travel on emergency roads only and to remain aware of the weather,” the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency said in a series of tweets about the damage from the Winston County.
In Monroe County in northeast Mississippi, several rural buildings were flattened or severely damaged after a storm rolled through Thursday morning, video tweeted by the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency showed.
There were no injuries, according to the agency, which said a tornado may have caused the damage. The weather service said preliminary that strong winds caused damage in the county.
Wind damage to trees and buildings was also reported elsewhere in parts of Mississippi, Alabama and Kentucky before noon, the weather service said.
In Georgia, a possible tornado damaged Griffin High School in Griffin, south of Atlanta. Trees fell and there was a leak in the gymnasium, said Adam Pugh, spokesman for the Griffin-Spalding School District.