A Swarm of ‘Pure Devastation’

A deadly mass of tornadoes erupted across the nation’s interior, killing at least 38 people in Missouri, Kansas and Tennessee, and forcing emergency officials Monday to cope with the prospect of more injured victims and hundreds left homeless.

Massive dark funnel clouds, some as wide as half a mile, snaked out from a storm system that raged from Sunday night into Monday across much of the Midwest and South. National Weather Service officials warned late Monday of a “high risk” that thunderstorm cells could spawn new tornado activity in Tennessee, Arkansas and Kentucky.

More than 83 tornado sightings were reported in the region. The fast-racing funnel clouds nearly obliterated several small towns and trapped people in homes and storm shelters. Cars, telephone poles, tree limbs and horses were flung over the rural landscape.

One gray tornado cloud churned across the hills of southwestern Missouri for more than half an hour Sunday night. When it was done, the tiny towns of Pierce City and Stockton were almost erased, six residents were dead and officials staggered out to an eerily placid dawn to comb for missing residents.

By day’s end, search teams found no other casualties, leaving officials to concentrate on aiding scores of families left without homes, water and power.

“It’s just pure devastation,” said Jack Goodman, a Missouri state legislator who listened from his basement as the roaring tornado descended on Pierce City on Sunday night. “Everything’s either leveled or just about leveled.”

Pancaked stacks of splintered wood, concrete and steel lined the town’s center for blocks.

On Commercial Street, the town’s main drag, century-old buildings that had been refurbished into thriving antique and art galleries were gone, reduced to teetering piles of brick. The walls of a supermarket were stoved in, but boxes of detergent sat in neat rows on unbowed shelves.

The scene was much the same several hundred miles away in Madison County, Tenn., where two tornadoes killed 11 people. Several of those victims, officials said, were killed in the town of Jackson, where tornado winds topping 113 mph raked downtown shops and buildings. Two others were killed elsewhere in the state.

“It wiped out a third of the town, I hate to say it,” said Edlon Bedene, Madison County’s emergency management director. “The trees are like somebody came in and cut them off 10 feet above the ground.”

Half of Jackson’s 60,000 residents were without power and scores were seeking shelter for the night. “It’s real bad,” said Jackson Mayor Charles Farmer. “It looks sort of like Baghdad after we finished with it.”

Just across the border from Missouri into southeast Kansas, a swarm of thin, coiling tornadoes tore up miles of remote rural landscape, uprooting barns and farmhouses and killing at least seven people, officials and witnesses said.

High winds forced officials at Kansas City International Airport to evacuate the air control tower and terminals for nearly an hour. At least one person died in the city’s suburbs, and scores of houses were uprooted.

“The majority of the town of Franklin is gone,” said Sandy Horton, sheriff in Crawford County, Kan. “And we lost most of the town of Ringo too.”

In many hard-hit communities, survivors said they had plenty of time to get to shelters. Sirens wailed and klaxons droned in towns equipped with early warning systems. Even in isolated farm country, television weather alerts and shouts from worried neighbors led many residents to bolt for their basements and storm cellars up to half an hour before the tornadoes struck.

But despite ample warnings, some still took chances, lingering outside to watch the darkening clouds or racing the storm in their cars, braving hailstones the size of softballs and wind-driven debris.

In Pierce City, a growing southwestern Missouri arts community of 1,400, several residents said the tornado’s sudden appearance caught people by surprise in front of a National Guard Armory that is used as a shelter.

Retreating inside, the panicked residents ran into a “bottleneck at the top of the stairs,” said Julie Johnson, who had reached safety in the basement.

“Some of them didn’t make it,” said Johnson, the town’s clerk. “It was a mad rush.”

Sheriff’s deputies and teams of tracker dogs sifted through the wreckage of the armory all day. At least eight people were unaccounted for, said Police Chief Mike Abramovitz, and one body was pulled from the rubble.

“This is my town, and now it’s gone,” Abramovitz said, choking back tears.

Touring the broken community, Missouri Gov. Bob Holden called the storms -- which killed at least 18 people in his state -- “the most devastating series of tornadoes we’ve ever had.”

As Holden and other governors prepared requests for disaster aid, federal emergency teams fanned out to provide service to stricken towns.

In Little Rock, Ark., President Bush expressed condolences for tornado victims and pledged that federal aid would move quickly.

“Nature is awfully tough at times,” Bush said. “The best thing we can do is pray for those who have suffered.”

Climate experts said Monday that it was too early to tell whether the tornadoes were F-5s, the most powerful classification, which pack winds of between 261 and 318 mph.

But witness accounts of funnel clouds with brutal crosscurrents led officials to suggest that some tornadoes may have approached those velocities.

“This was a big frontal system and we saw it gathering strength all day,” said F. Adnan Akyuz, a University of Missouri climate expert who serves as Missouri state climatologist. “I can’t say it surprised us, not at this time of year. But it was certainly powerful.”

Weather officials in Tennessee said the tornado that plowed through the town of Jackson was likely an F-2 storm, stoked by winds ranging from 113 to 157 mph.

In Girard, Kan., town librarian Terri Harley said the fierce tornado winds that swept through the area carried off a bank deposit bag from a farmer’s home. Hours later, the man was notified that the bag had been recovered near Springfield, Mo., nearly 120 miles away.

Harley and her husband raced the funnel cloud into town late Sunday, trying to reach their home and their teenage son. Calling on a cell phone, they told him to get into the cellar.

Then they drove headlong toward town as the sky blackened.

“We were five miles out and we had to keep stopping because we couldn’t see 2 feet in front of us,” Harley said. When they arrived, the funnel cloud had already passed. Their son and house were spared. “That’s not a race I’d want to try again,” she said.

Nearly 80 homes were damaged or destroyed in Crawford County, at least 20 of them in nearby Franklin, officials said. Outside one farmhouse, Harley said, survivors found a dead horse that had been lifted into the air and thrown back to earth.

Horton, the Crawford County sheriff, said the tornado killed three people outside Girard. Eight others were injured and taken to hospitals in Kansas City, he said.

Horton and several deputies stayed outside as the tornadoes appeared, trying to follow them and report their position. But they found themselves playing a dangerous game of chicken -- trying to stay ahead of the funnels, but repeatedly jamming on their brakes to avoid flying aluminum siding, branches and debris.

After the storms passed, they noticed their patrol car tires were leaking air -- punctured by nails, jagged wood and patches of bad road carved out by the winds.

“That’s not the way I want to spend my Sunday nights,” Horton said.

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Hart reported from Pierce City and Braun from Washington. Times staff writers Ken Ellingwood reported from Atlanta, Maura Reynolds from Little Rock and Larry B. Stammer from Kansas City. Times researcher John Beckham contributed to this report.