ADEL, Ga. -- Emergency responders rushed to answer new reports of deaths and injuries Sunday evening in southern Georgia from violent storms already blamed for killing 16 people in the Southeast.
An apparent tornado blew through a mobile home park early Sunday in southern Georgia's rural Cook County, shearing off siding, upending homes and killing eight people, County Commissioner Jeff Lane said. Two people apiece were confirmed dead in neighboring Brooks and Berrien counties, bringing Georgia's toll to 12 a day after a reported tornado killed four in Hattiesburg, Miss.
Lane surveyed the wreckage at the Sunshine Acres trailer park on Sunday morning.
"It's like a bomb had been dropped out here, at ground level," Lane said in a telephone interview. "You've got mobile home frames that look like spaghetti noodles. We've tried to evacuate as many as we can. But it's raining real hard, and we're getting ready to start another round of storms."
Coroner Tim Purvis said the park had about 40 mobile homes, and roughly half were destroyed. Police cordoned off the area.
Search and rescue operations were underway Sunday night in Dougherty County, where a reported tornado carved a path of destruction about 3 p.m., said Sedon Burns, the county's chief deputy emergency manager. The county is home to Albany, southwest Georgia's largest city with about 76,000 residents.
"We know we have fatalities and a lot of injuries," said Burns, who declined to estimate how many were dead or hurt. "And there is substantive damage to one of our trailer parks."
President Donald Trump said Sunday that he had spoken with Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal and "expressed our sincere condolences for the lives taken."
"Tornadoes were vicious and powerful and strong, and they suffered greatly," Trump said during a White House ceremony where he was swearing in aides. "So we'll be helping out the state of Georgia."
Georgia's governor declared a state of emergency in seven southern Georgia counties, freeing up state resources to assist with recovery efforts.
"Our thoughts and prayers are with Georgians suffering from the storm's impact," Deal said in a statement.
'It was just a debris field'
Not far from the mobile home park in Adel, 19-year-old Jenny Bullard wore a sling on her injured arm as she combed the rubble of her family's brick house. All that remained standing Sunday afternoon was the master bedroom and parts of the kitchen.
"It's a horrible tragedy," Bullard said. "But all this stuff can be replaced. We can't replace each other. We're extremely lucky."
Bullard said she awoke before dawn Sunday to the sound of hail pounding the roof. When she went outside her bedroom door, she was knocked down by a collapsing wall in the hallway. She managed to get up and found her father calling for her, trapped under debris.
She pulled him free, and they found her mother in the master bedroom. They escaped by climbing over piles of furniture and debris where the wall to their home office once stood.
Several homes appeared to be destroyed along a road within about 2 miles of the mobile home park, with cinderblocks scattered on the ground, and pine trees uprooted and snapped in half. The tops of broken utility poles lay alongside the road.
Nathaniel Fixberry, an Air Force staff sergeant, drove to the scene to try to help.
"I saw mattresses in trees probably half a mile down the road from where I was," Fixberry said. "It was just a debris field."
The South Georgia Motorsports Park in Cecil was heavily damaged; a grandstand was ripped apart. Barrels, signs, insulation and garbage were strewn over the speedway and parking lot.
Two of Sunday's deaths occurred when a mobile home in Brooks County was struck by an apparent tornado that moved the home roughly 100 yards before dawn Sunday.
"A tornado hit a mobile home, picked it up and put it in the middle of Highway 122," Brooks County Coroner Michael Miller said. "I don't know if it rolled or was lifted, but it blocked the entire highway."
Catherine Howden of the Georgia Emergency Management Agency said earlier Sunday that the deaths occurred in Cook, Brooks and Berrien counties in southern Georgia near the Georgia-Florida line. She said another 23 people were injured.
The sheriff's office and coroner in Berrien County could not immediately be reached for comment Sunday. Their phones repeatedly had busy signals.
In Dougherty County, Bridgit Simmons was with her parents, her daughter and her grandson in their brick home in Albany when the sky grew dark Sunday afternoon.
"I was in the den and I heard that loud roar, and I grabbed the baby and I said, 'Let's go, guys. This is it,'" she said. "We laid down, and that was it."
But within a few minutes the storm had passed. Their home was mostly unscathed -- except for the carport, which had collapsed atop two cars.
When Simmons opened a door to see what had happened, there was a bright burst of light from her normally shady yard.
"All the trees were gone," she said.
Four dead in Mississippi
Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant declared a state of emergency after the Saturday storm in which winds topped 136 mph. A 24-mile stretch of southern Mississippi was hit hardest, and Insurance Commissioner Mike Chaney said insured damages will likely top $200 million.
The Forrest County coroner identified the state's dead as Earnest Perkins, 58; Cleveland Madison, 20; David Wayne McCoy, 47; and Simona Cox, 72.
Monica McCarty lost her father, Perkins, and her son, Madison, in the storm. Perkins died in the same Hattiesburg trailer park where McCarty and her boyfriend live. Madison was apparently crushed to death while in bed.
"They couldn't get him out of the house. They said he was lying in the bed," McCarty said of her son.
Her boyfriend, Tackeem Molley, said he and McCarty were in a trailer when the storm hit. Molley, whose bare foot was bandaged, said he climbed out through a hole in what had either been the trailer's roof or wall.
"I had a little hole I could squeeze out of," he said.
The task of recovery will be difficult in Petal, a city of 10,000 people across the Leaf River from Hattiesburg.
Michelle Kirk, who has lived for five years in a Petal subdivision, was looking at squatting in a damaged house that may be without power for as long as a week. At dusk Saturday, more than 6,000 people were without power in Forrest and Lamar counties. Utilities were warning that restoration could take days because of damage to transmission lines, even as crews worked into the night.
Kirk said her 15-year-old daughter Kimmie burst into her parents' room to warn that her phone was sounding a tornado warning. Kirk hustled her children into a closet, and she and her husband followed them in.
"As soon as we did, I heard glass breaking," Kirk said. "I had debris -- leaves, roof tiles, anything you can think of -- in my kitchen."
One sharpened piece of wood shot through the roof and landed on the bed where her younger daughter would have been sleeping.
William Carey sent students home from the campus where 3,200 of them study and 800 live. Spokesman Mia Overton says school officials hope to restart classes in borrowed space at the University of Southern Mississippi or at Pearl River Community College while the campus is repaired.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has issued a "high risk" severe weather outlook for parts of the Southeast -- notably Georgia and portions of Alabama and Florida. Since Saturday morning, 30 reports of tornadoes were recorded in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi, according to the agency.
Eileen Lainez, a spokesman for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said the agency had deployed liaison officers to Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia and Florida to provide help as needed, she said.
If the storm fatalities reported so far this year -- four in Alabama on Jan. 2, four in Mississippi and 12 in Georgia -- are all attributed to twisters, this January's death toll would be worse than 1999. That year, 18 people -- including eight Arkansans -- died in series of storms in Texas, Arkansas and Tennessee.
Information for this article was contributed by Brendan Farrington, Jay Reeves, Jeff Amy, Russ Bynum, Justin Juozapavicius and Pamela Sampson of The Associated Press; by Richard Fausset and Jonah Engel Bromwich of The New York Times; and by Dan Lamothe, Jason Samenow and John Wagner of The Washington Post.
A Section on 01/23/2017