Alan Blinder, Jack Healy, Matt Stevens and Audra Melton

<h1>BEAUREGARD, Ala. — When Taylor Thornton’s father finally found her Sunday afternoon, lying in the wreckage of her best friend’s home, he told his wife that it looked like she was sleeping.</h1>

Taylor, 10, had been away for the weekend and was at the mobile home of her friend’s father when weather forecasters and emergency officials began blasting out increasingly urgent alerts about tornadoes in the area.

A warning was issued at 1:58 p.m., and within eight or nine minutes, winds of about 170 mph were pulverizing houses, hurling cars into the air and clear-cutting trees. David Thornton rushed to the mobile home on Lee Road 38 in Beauregard — the epicenter of the destruction — and came upon a sheriff’s deputy standing guard.

The tornado ripped a mile-wide gash through the heart of this rural community in eastern Alabama, killing at least 23 people in the deadliest tornado to hit the United States in six years, including three children. Dozens of others were injured, and the authorities said Monday that an untold number still had not been accounted for.

“After it was confirmed,” Ashley Thornton said of her daughter’s death, family and friends “just kind of crumbled.”

The tornado shredded this close-knit community of mobile homes and vinyl-sided double-wides.

“This hurts my heart,” Sheriff Jay Jones of Lee County said. “These people are tough, they’re resilient. It’s knocked them down.”

As search dogs were led through the staggering piles of debris and drones with infrared sensors buzzed overhead, officials said that they had not found additional bodies. Officials did not release the names of the dead Monday, but family members began identifying them in conversations and on social media, sharing stories of how Dad was gone, or how a desperate search for a sister and her boyfriend had ended with the worst possible news.

Bill Harris, the Lee County coroner, said he would be meeting privately with the victims’ families, adding that the authorities had verified the identities of all but six of them. He said the two other children killed were 6 and 9 years old.

“We lost children, mothers, fathers, neighbors and friends,” Gov. Kay Ivey said at an afternoon news conference. In an apparent nod to the 2011 tornadoes that killed about 250 people across Alabama, Ivey added: “We will overcome this loss. We’ve done it before. We’ll do it again.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="784f790a-1bea-45a1-ad57-871632466144" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/04/us/tornadoes-alabama-live-updates.html">The New York Times</a>.

As Tornadoes Roared Across Alabama, 'There Wasn't Even Time to Be Afraid'

A warning was issued at 1:58 p.m., and within eight or nine minutes, winds of about 170 mph were pulverizing houses, hurling cars into the air and clear-cutting trees.

As tornadoes roared across Alabama, 'there wasn't even time to be afraid'

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Alan Blinder, Jack Healy, Matt Stevens and Audra Melton

Articles written by the author

As tornadoes roared across Alabama, 'there wasn't even time to be afraid'