In Wake of Sudden Tornadoes, A Long Path of Shock and Loss

It didn't seem like tornado weather. The rain was sparse, and there was no thunder. But in the morning, the high school students in Enterprise, Ala., were herded into the interior hallways to brace for the possibility. Kids joked and chatted. They had been through this drill before.

Soon, eight would be dead.

On Friday, the people of Enterprise, as in 30 other places around the country struck the day before by what people said were tornadoes, were still struggling to come to grips with what had hit them.

There were reports of damage from Illinois to the Florida Panhandle. Authorities counted 20 tornado deaths in the United States, all but one in Alabama and Georgia. Hundreds of homes were damaged or destroyed.

The recovery work began in earnest, with power saws buzzing and electric-line crews and rescue workers converging where the twisters had touched down. President Bush said he would be visiting with "a heavy heart." But underlying it all for many of those most affected was a sense of wonder at the quickness and power of the winds that had turned a typical day into a catastrophe.

"First, I heard someone say 'Oh, no' and 'Take cover!' and you could hear the freight-train noise and the banging of debris," said Granison Wagstaff, a substitute teacher at Enterprise High School.

Then walls of the corridor crumbled.

"It was over in just a few minutes, and then I could hear 'Help me!' and 'I'm trapped,' " Wagstaff recalled Friday. "One girl under the rubble kept saying, 'I'm going to die.' "

Six people were also killed in Newton, Ga., and two more in Americus, Ga., where the winds blew out windows of a hospital and forced doctors, nurses and volunteers to evacuate dozens of patients.

"It's just a blessing, frankly, that we didn't have more fatalities than we did," Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue (R) told reporters, declaring a state of emergency in six counties.

A confluence of conditions caused a system of thunderstorms to spin off the violent tornadoes, meteorologists said. Warm, wet air was blowing up from the Gulf of Mexico, while cooler, drier winds were blowing in from the West. Elevated winds in the jet stream helped spin the thunderstorms.

"These were ideal conditions for the supercell type of thunderstorms that produce the strong and violent tornadoes that are long-tracked and long-lived," said Dennis Feltgen, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service. "As they approached Alabama, some of these thunderstorms began to rotate. That's when you know the storm is especially dangerous."