Tornados kill 200 across American South

Officials said they were the deadliest storms in nearly 40 years and they expected the death toll to rise.

In Alabama, where as many as a million people were without power, Governor Robert Bentley yesterday said 2,000 national guard troops had been deployed and were helping to search devastated areas for people still missing.

He said the National Weather Service and forecasters did a good job of alerting people, but there is only so much that can be done to deal with tornados “a mile wide”.

“You cannot prepare against an F5,” the most powerful category on a scale for measuring wind intensity, he said.

The US National Weather Service’s Storm Prediction Centre said the number of deaths was the most in a tornado outbreak since 1974, when 315 people died.

The centre said it received 137 tornado reports around the region into Wednesday night.

One of the hardest-hit areas was Tuscaloosa, a city of more than 83,000 and home to the University of Alabama. The city’s emergency services were devastated and at least 15 people were killed.

By nightfall, the city was dark. Roads were impassable. Signs were blown down from the front of restaurants, businesses were unrecognisable and sirens wailed. Debris littered the streets.

The storm system spread destruction from Texas to New York, where dozens of roads were flooded or washed out.

“We were in the bathroom holding on to each other and holding on to dear life,” said Samantha Nail, who lives in Birmingham, Alabama, where the storm slammed pick-up trucks into ditches and obliterated brick houses. “If it wasn’t for our concrete walls, our home would be gone like the rest of them.”

Alabama confirmed 131 deaths, while 32 died in Mississippi, 15 in Tennessee, 13 in Georgia, eight in Virginia and one in Kentucky.