ALBANY, Ga. — A tornado warning on television sent Anthony Mitchell, his pregnant wife and their three children scrambling for what little shelter their mobile home could provide. They crouched in a hallway as the twister started taking their home apart piece by piece.
“The windows exploded, the doors flew off the hinges, the sheetrock started to rip off the walls and fly out the windows,” Mitchell said. “The trailer started to lift up. And about that time a tree fell on the trailer, and I think that's what held the trailer in place from flying away.”
An unusual midwinter barrage of tornadoes and thunderstorms over the weekend was blamed for at least 20 deaths across the Deep South. Among them were three people killed at Big Pine Estates, the mobile home park in Albany where the Williams family lives.
A twister slammed into the southwestern Georgia city of 76,000 people on Sunday afternoon, carving a path of destruction a half-mile wide in places and leaving the landscape strewn with broken trees and mangled sheet metal. Few of the roughly 200 homes at the trailer park escaped damage from the tornado, which was rated by forecasters as at least an EF-2, meaning it packed wind of 111 to 135 mph.
In addition to the three dead at Big Pine Estates, a fourth body was discovered at a home just outside the trailer park.
Mitchell lost his home and marveled that he didn't lose his life, too.
“Something helped us walk out the front door of the house,” he said. “There's some people who weren't fortunate enough to have a front door to walk out of.”
Georgia reported 15 deaths Sunday, and four people died Saturday in Mississippi. In northern Florida, a woman died after a tree crashed into her home in Lake City as a storm passed through.
The National Weather Service said 39 possible tornadoes were reported over the weekend. The agency sent out teams to examine the damage and confirm how many of the storms were twisters, which can happen any time of year but are far more common in the spring and early summer.
Meanwhile, a powerful storm system plowed up the Eastern seaboard with torrential showers and high wind Monday, hindering airline and rail travel.
The storm turned cooler as it advanced on the Northeast, where residents faced potential flooding, downed power lines and high surf late Monday and early Tuesday, said Tim Morrin, the National Weather Service's New York observation program leader.
“The best place to be is inside,” Morrin said.
About 742 airline flights were canceled, with New York metropolitan airports bearing the brunt of the aviation disruptions, according to the air traffic website FlightAware.
