Asia-Pacific

35 dead in 6 US states after storm's rampage

(Agencies)
Updated: 2011-04-17 21:26

One of the volunteers who scoured the rubble was an Iraq war veteran who told Lamb he was stunned by what he saw.

"He did two tours of duty in Iraq and the scene was worse than he ever saw in Iraq - that's pretty devastating," Lamb said.

As dawn broke, dozens of firefighters, volunteers and other officials were meeting in a makeshift command center to form search teams to fan out to the hardest-hit areas.

"There were several cases of houses being totally demolished except for one room, and that's where the people were," he said. "They survived. Pretty devastating."

Authorities in North Carolina said they would provide more details of the death toll later Sunday after checking on the reports of fatalities in at least four counties and in the capital city of Raleigh. Search and rescue teams operated through the night, Perdue said, with damage assessments starting in earnest Sunday after daylight.

"There's a lot of work that needs to be done in these areas that are most heavily impacted," said Doug Hoell, the state's director of emergency management. "There's a lot of debris out there that's got to be cleaned up."

In Virginia, disaster officials said one apparent tornado ripped across more than 12 miles through Gloucester County, uprooting trees and pounding homes to rubble while claiming three lives. Another person was confirmed dead and another remained missing early Sunday after flash flooding elsewhere in Virginia.

Scenes of destruction across the South looked eerily similar in many areas.

In North Carolina, rooftops were ripped off stores, trees were plucked from the ground and scores of homes were damaged, Hoell said.

At one point, more than 250,000 people went without power in North Carolina before emergency utility crews began repairing downed lines. But scattered outages were expected to linger at least until Monday.