- NASHVILLE, Tenn. (Reuters)
- Blackouts, water shortages and desperate searches for the missing confronted
tornado-battered residents of the central United States on Tuesday as the
death toll rose to 40 from the most violent weather in four years.
-
- Some streams and rivers in Tennessee were at flood stage
or above, adding to that state's misery as forecasters warned a third day
of severe weather was possible on Tuesday in parts of Missouri and Arkansas.
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- The National Weather Service said there were apparently
more than 80 tornadoes since Sunday in the hardest-hit states of Missouri,
Tennessee and Kansas. The National Storm Prediction Center said reports
of funnel sightings and damage had also come in from seven other states
running from the Midwest into the South.
-
- Missouri listed 17 deaths, Kansas seven and Tennessee
16, including four people killed while driving on flood-swept roads. Power
blackouts were widespread and bottled water was being shipped into areas
where supplies were contaminated or pumping equipment knocked out.
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- Hundreds of people were being housed in temporary shelters.
For many victims, there was little personal property left to recover from
flattened homes.
-
- Search and rescue efforts were still under way in Missouri
and Tennessee from the killer tornadoes there on Sunday night and early
Monday.
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- At Pierce City, Missouri, a community of 1,400 about
150 miles south of Kansas City, a wide section of the downtown business
district was reduced to rubble. House-by-house searches continued there
for four missing people. Missouri Gov. Bob Holden asked President Bush
to declare 39 counties in the state to be disaster areas, making them eligible
for special aid.
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- Damage in the metropolitan Kansas City area in Missouri
and Kansas was estimated at $20 million.
-
- There were two people reported missing at Jackson, Tennessee,
a town of 60,000 about 65 miles northeast of Memphis. The storms may have
blown the two into a pond where a police search was concentrated.
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- Jackson was hit by a tornado in 1999 that killed six
people. Among the structures damaged by the latest storm was a memorial
to the victims of the earlier storm. Officials said the more recent storm
caused damage much worse than the 1999 tornado, with nearly every building
in the downtown section damaged in some fashion.
-
- The violent weather was the worst of its kind since May
1999 when storms killed 46 in Oklahoma and Kansas. While high, the casualty
toll was nowhere near the record for a U.S. tornado outbreak set by storms
of April 3 and 4 in 1974 that took 307 lives in 13 states.
-
- In an average year, the United States records about 70
tornado deaths, but population growth and urbanization that has turned
many rural areas into subdivisions put more people at risk from the storms
each year.
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