Deaths from US tornadoes rise to nine as crews search for trapped survivors

The death toll from tornadoes that tore through parts of Georgia and Alabama rose to at least nine on Friday afternoon as rescue crews continued to search for trapped survivors and additional victims.

Authorities were beginning to get a better picture of the damage caused by a twister that wrecked buildings and tossed cars in the streets of historic downtown Selma, Alabama, late on Thursday. Houses were torn off their foundations and property was smashed up and flattened by flying debris and ripped up trees.

Searchers in Autauga county, Alabama, found a body after daybreak near a home that had been badly damaged, authorities said. That death brought the toll to at least seven in the same county, about 40 miles northeast of Selma.

Two other victims were confirmed in Georgia, including a five-year-old child riding in a vehicle struck by a falling tree in central Butts county, and a state transportation department worker killed while responding to storm damage.

At least 35 possible tornado touchdowns were reported across several states, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), while the National Weather Service (NWS) said suspected tornado damage was reported in at least 14 counties in Alabama and five in Georgia. Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky, South Carolina and North Carolina all saw tornado warnings for a time.

Tens of thousands of homes and businesses were still without power in Georgia and Alabama on Friday, according to PowerOutage.us.

In Selma, a city etched in the history of the civil rights movement, the city council used lights from cellphones as they held a meeting on the sidewalk to declare a state of emergency.

Malesha McVay took video of the giant twister, which would turn black as it swept away home after home.

Officials in Griffin, south of Atlanta, told local news outlets that multiple people had been trapped inside an apartment complex after trees fell on it.

One store in the city partially lost its roof, while elsewhere in town firefighters cut a man loose who had been pinned for hours under a tree that fell on his house. The city imposed a curfew from 10pm Thursday to 6am Friday.

School systems in at least six Georgia counties canceled classes for almost 100,000 children on Friday.

In Kentucky, the National Weather Service in Louisville confirmed that a tornado struck Mercer county and said crews were surveying damage in a handful of other counties.

Normally the air in the south-east is fairly dry at this time of year but the dew point was twice what is normal, probably because of unusually warm water in the Gulf of Mexico, which is probably influenced by climate change. That moisture hit the cold front and everything was in place, Gensini said.

Meanwhile, California can expect another clobbering from the ongoing series of severe storms, driven by yet another so-called atmospheric river weather event arriving to drench the state and dump up to six feet of snow at altitude between Friday and Tuesday.