Counseling Team Visits School That Lost 3 People to Tornado

A team of psychologists visited a school for troubled boys Tuesday, a day after a deadly tornado careened through this picturesque mountain town, killing two of the school’s students and a staff member.

“I don’t think the kids really grasp the magnitude,” Paul Shafiroff, education director at the Eagleton School, said Tuesday as 43 boys watched television, played cards, cleaned up after the storm or visited with the half a dozen counselors.

“It’s beyond their real understanding,” said Shafiroff, whose school is for mentally retarded boys with emotional and behavioral problems.

Four people, including two teen-agers and a 61-year-old staff member, were returning to the school from a shopping trip when the tornado hit, with winds estimated at 260 m.p.h. hurling their car into a stand of trees. Three of them were killed in the storm’s only confirmed fatalities. Two hikers were initially reported missing but authorities called off a massive search Tuesday, saying they believed the report was erroneous.

School counselor Seung (Sonny) Choi, who was driving, was thrown from the car and critically hurt. He was hospitalized at Berkshire Medical Center.

“He said, ‘The children were belted in but I don’t know where the car is,’ ” said school director Bruce Bona, who found Choi dazed and walking along a highway looking for the car.

The tornado, meanwhile, ripped a swath hundreds of yards wide from the eastern New York county of Columbia to the Berkshire mountain town of Otis, about 15 miles away, as it rolled through the Berkshires of western Massachusetts.

The tornado blew down power lines and snapped trees two feet thick. It killed the three people from the school, injured 24 others and damaged more than 1,200 homes and 15 businesses.

A nursing home that lost part of its roof was among the buildings damaged in Great Barrington, a tourist town of 7,725 residents just across the state line from New York. The home’s 120 residents were evacuated.

In the Midwest, forecasts for clear skies should give relief workers needed time in their fight against high water on the Mississippi and Illinois rivers. But in Tennessee, two children drowned while swimming in a flooded backwater area, and a third youngster was missing.

Hundreds of convict laborers and others raced to reinforce levees with sandbags before the rain-swollen Illinois River crests, while Missouri released some National Guardsmen from flood duty.

President Clinton on Tuesday declared a major disaster in Illinois and ordered federal funds to supplement state and local recovery efforts in communities struck by the severe storms and flooding. The action makes federal funding available to affected individuals in Madison and St. Clair counties.