Damage, Deaths Amid Winter Tornadoes and Storms in South

Bridgit Simmons and her family had heard storm warnings all day Sunday, but that afternoon it all happened so fast as storms that killed at least 18 over the weekend moved across the Deep South.

She along with her parents, her daughter and her grandson were in their brick home in the southwest Georgia city of Albany when the sky got dark and the wind began to howl. “I was in the den and I heard that loud roar and I grabbed the baby and I said, ‘Let’s go guys. This is it.’ We laid down and that was it.” The wind was so loud, she added, “you could hear it beating back and forth.”

Minutes later, their home was largely unscathed, save for a carport that collapsed atop two cars. But trees were down all around, police sirens wailed and authorities would add three more deaths for an overall count of at least 18.

Authorities said at least 14 deaths occurred in south Georgia alone, seven from an apparent winter twister that tore through a trailer park some 60 miles from Simmons’ home before dawn Sunday.

Elsewhere, shredded siding from mobile homes, a house stripped of exterior walls but left standing, even a piano blown outdoors, all bore evidence of the power of a vast storm system that began its two-day assault on the South with four deaths Saturday in Mississippi.

Coroner Tim Purvis in south Georgia’s Cook County confirmed that seven people died at the mobile home park in the small community of Adel. Roughly half of the 40 homes were leveled.

Debris of pulverized homes lay not far from a section of mobile homes largely untouched. The area was empty of survivors after police cordoned off the site.

Weather experts say tornadoes can hit any time of year in the South – including in the dead of winter. Even north Florida was under the weekend weather threat.

While the central U.S. has a fairly defined tornado season – the spring – the risk of tornadoes “never really goes to zero” for most of the year in the Southeast, explained Patrick Marsh of the Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma.

He said 39 possible tornadoes were reported across the Southeast from early Saturday into Sunday evening – none immediately confirmed. Of that, 30 were reported in Georgia, four in Mississippi, and one each in Louisiana and South Carolina.

January tornado outbreaks are rare but not unprecedented, particularly in the South. Data from the Storm Prediction Center shows that, over the past decade, the nation has seen an average of 38 tornadoes in January, ranging from a high of 84 in 2008 to just four in 2014.

Nineteen-year-old Jenny Bullard said she and her parents, Jeff and Carla, are glad to have escaped without major injury after an apparent tornado battered their home in Cook County. They are a farming family dating back generations, living not far from where the mobile homes were destroyed.

The middle section of their brick house was blown off the slab, leaving nothing but the kitchen island standing. On one side, the parents’ bedroom remained intact. Jenny’s bedroom on the other side was smashed in _ and a piano was blown out of the house.

She recalled awaking to the sound of hail before dawn.

“The hall wall came in on me and I fell down. And our backdoor came through and fell in on me. And I heard my dad calling my name …There was a bunch of stuff on top of him and I just started throwing everything I could until I got to him,” she said.

Together, she and her father met up with their mother and got free.

The young woman wore a sling on one arm hours afterward Sunday as she went back through the debris for belongings. Bricks lay scattered about, alongside their possessions and furniture.

“The first thing I wanted to do was get all the pictures,” she said. Across the street, where the Bullards kept farm equipment in sheds, one shed was blown in amid twisted metal. Two grain silos were blown over.

“It’s a horrible tragedy. But all this stuff can be replaced,” she said. “We can’t replace each other. We’re extremely lucky. My dad is lucky to be alive.”

(Reeves reported from Albany, Georgia, and Farrington from Adel, Georgia. Associated Press writers Russ Bynum in Savannah, Georgia; Justin Juozapavicius in Tulsa, Oklahoma; and Bill Cormier in Atlanta contributed to this report.)