More than two dozen people were killed in tornadoes and severe thunderstorms that tore across the Southeast on Sunday and early Monday, destroying homes and knocking out power for thousands of people, meteorologists and officials said.
At least 29 people died as a result of the devastating weather system, whose “bull’s-eye” encircled a swath of the South. It brought tornadoes, high winds and intense rain into parts of southern Kentucky, eastern Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana and Arkansas, said Katie Martin, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.
“It was one coherent system with different features within it,” she said. “We don’t get this level of a threat very often. It was a very turbulent past 24 hours.”
Mississippi on Monday reported the most deaths of any state. The state’s emergency management agency said that at least 11 people had been confirmed dead.
Several hundred homes were damaged and more than 72,000 customers lost power across 18 counties, the agency said in a statement. “This is not how anyone wants to celebrate Easter Sunday,” Gov. Tate Reeves of Mississippi, a Republican, said in a statement as he declared a state of emergency.
In Georgia, at least six people were killed after a tornado swept through a mobile home park in Murray County, and one person died in Bartow County in the northwest of the state, Lisa Rodriguez-Presley, a spokeswoman for the state emergency management authorities, said on Monday. A total of eight people in Georgia died in the storms, according to The Associated Press. About 49 people were injured and 23 homes were destroyed, but the authorities have hundreds more residences to assess, Ms. Rodriguez-Presley said.
In Arkansas, at least one storm-related death was confirmed in Jefferson County, Melody Daniel, a state emergency management spokeswoman said on Monday.
Nine people were killed in South Carolina. In Seneca, S.C., a security guard at a BorgWarner production plant was killed when the building where he was stationed collapsed around 3:30 a.m. Monday, according to Karl Addis, the Oconee County coroner. The man, Jack Harvill, 77, was employed by American Security and died from blunt force traumatic injuries.
A 61-year-old woman in Davidson County, N.C., died Monday morning after a tree fell on her mobile home, according to the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services.
Jenny Gross contributed reporting.
