Tornado strikes Indiana & Kentucky - 11/6/05

[E64PCFD2044 1]

FOXNews Full Story

EVANSVILLE, Ind. — At least 20 people were killed and about 200 injured early Sunday when a tornado ripped through Kentucky and Indiana as rescuers assisted trapped residents and about 25,000 were without power, local officials said. The death toll was expected to rise.

"All of the sudden you could just hear a freight train coming,” Chad Bennett, Indiana Fire Department assistant chief, described as the tornado approached Newburgh, Ind.

"It basically just took everything in its path.”

At the Eastbrook Mobile Home Park (search) on the southeast side of Evansville, Ind., 16 people were confirmed dead, as well as four others in Warrick County, Ind.

Affected areas include Henderson County, Kentucky, and the southern Indiana counties of Vanderburgh and Warrick.

Warrick County Sheriff Marvin Heilman said the victims included a woman who was eight months pregnant, her husband and a young child in the rural town of Degonia Springs. A teenage girl was also killed near Boonville, and her father was critically injured after the twister hit around 2 p.m. CST, Heilman said.

The National Weather Service could not immediately be reached for comment. Heilman said it appeared that a single tornado was responsible for the damage and that it cut about a 30-mile-long path through his county, passing north of Newburgh and south of Boonville before dissipating near the town of Tennyson.

"I've been here 30 years and I've never seen this amount of destruction. We've never had anything of this magnitude," Heilman said.

Emergency personnel were checking on county residents.

"We’re going door to door and street to street to clear the houses,” Heilman said.

“There are several hundred houses” that were completely destroyed.

“Tornadoes are not horribly uncommon here … but usually not of this magnitude," he said of Warrick, describing it as a "fairly rural" county with a population of 57,000 people.

The worst damage hit the south and northeast parts of the county, Sue Buchanan of the Warrick County (search) sheriff's department told FOX News in a telephone interview.

"We’ve had considerable damage. ... We’re trying to assess all the damage and take it from there," Buchanan said.

About 200 emergency workers were called to the trailer park.

"We're treating the trailer park as a mass disaster area," Eric Williams, chief deputy of the Vanderburgh County Sheriff's department, told the Evansville Courier & Press.

National Guard units were being mobilized to help with the search and recovery efforts, said Jane Jankowski, spokeswoman for Gov. Mitch Daniels.

Annie Groves, chief deputy coroner for Vanderburgh County, said she expected the death toll to grow because an unknown number of dead and injured people were believed trapped in debris at the park.

"They were in trailer homes, homes that were just torn apart by the storm, so they're just now getting in there trying to find people," Groves said. "It's just terrible."

Indiana homeland security spokeswoman Pam Bright said that about 100 homes were destroyed and 125 others damaged at the Eastbrook Mobile Home Park, where there were about 320 occupied homes.

Residents in the affected areas had little warning before the tornado struck in the very early morning hours. “It was pretty much a complete surprise,” said Michael Hart, spokesman for Deaconess Hospital in Evansville, about 10 miles to 15 miles from the trailer park.

Some 15 patients admitted to Deaconess Hospital were in critical condition Sunday morning, Hart told FOX News, but “most of them have just been minor injuries.”

“We haven’t had any fatalities at Deaconess Hospital,” he said.

Those seeking loved ones affected by the severe weather may call a hotline set up by the hospital, 812-450-7200.

Bennett described the atmosphere just before the twister struck in Newburgh. “I could see the black clouds" and dime-sized hail. Bennett said he ran inside and he and his family took shelter in the bathroom.

“We always tell people to find an interior room in [their] house,” he said.

“I could just barely hear the sirens,” he said, adding that many people probably slept through the warning signal.

“It was a very traumatic experience for me, my wife and my kids,” he said.

Damage also was reported at the Ellis Park racetrack, between Evansville and Henderson, Ky. The Henderson County Sheriff's department reported that about half of the track's grandstands had been destroyed, as well as horse barns and housing units on the back side of the track.

Paul Kuerzi, the track's vice president and general manager, said that several people had been injured at Ellis Park and a number of horses killed.

Witnesses said the tornado touched down first near Henderson, and then hopped across the Ohio River into Indiana.

Mike Roeder, a spokesman for local utility company Vectren, said 25,000 homes were without power early Sunday morning, mostly in Warrick County. There also were reports of natural gas leaks.

The tornado developed in a line of thunderstorms that rolled rapidly eastward across the Ohio Valley during the morning. The National Weather Service (search) posted severe thunderstorm warnings for sections of northern Ohio.

Survivors Recall Frightening Experience

Steve Sublett said his home in the Eastbrook park was destroyed as he lay in his bed.

"All of a sudden I heard a big kaboom and everything around me just like shattered and collapsed in on me. It was as if a big bomb went off," he said as he sat in his wheelchair outside the park.

Sublett told WIKY radio in Evansville that he was initially trapped under his headboard. "When I finally dug out a little bit, I could see nothing but sky," he said.

Tim Martin, 42, was staying overnight at his parents' mobile home when the tornado struck.

Martin said he and his parents were awakened by the wind, which picked up the mobile home and moved it halfway into the neighbor's yard, shattering glass and shaking the home.

He and his parents escaped unharmed, but he said they heard several neighbors calling for help. A neighboring mobile home was overturned, he said, and another appeared to have been obliterated.

"All I could see was debris," he said. "I thought it was a bad dream."

Larry Brown, 38, a truck driver, and his family rode out the storm inside their mobile home, which suffered exterior damage.

"When you open the door, you expect to see a bunch of trailers sitting there. We opened the door and there wasn't anything sitting there," he said.

Brown said one trailer near him had flipped on top of another mobile home, while another was split down the middle.

Witnesses said many other neighborhoods had trees uprooted and homes destroyed.

Patty Ellerbusch, 53, said the storm stripped the roof off most of her one-story ranch home in Newburgh, destroyed their barn and left the trees around their hilltop home shattered and shorn of limbs.

Ellerbusch said she and her husband, David, 56, were in bed when a relative called and warned that a tornado was on the ground. They heard a low roaring sound and ran for their basement.

She made it downstairs, but her husband didn't. He was blasted with shattered drywall, wood and other debris as the tornado shredded their home's roof.

"He was running down the hallway and it knocked him down and ripped his glasses off. He said it felt like being in a wind tunnel," she said.

Bright said the tornado was the deadliest to strike Indiana since April 3, 1974, when an outbreak of several tornadoes killed 47 people and destroyed and destroyed 2,069 homes.

Gov. Mitch Daniels traveled to the area to survey the damage, spokeswoman Jane Jankowski said.

Jankowski said 50 members of the Indiana National Guard had been activated to help with recovery efforts and that 300 other troops are on-call if needed.

FOX News' Heather Scroope and The Associated Press contributed to this report.