By HEATHER HOLLINGSWORTH, Associated Press Heather Hollingsworth, Associated Press – Sat Jan 1, 11:54 pm ET
KANSAS CITY, Mo. – Shaken residents spent New Year's Day sifting through the wreckage wrought by tornadoes that touched down in several states on the last day of 2010, killing seven people and injuring dozens of others.
Six people — three in Missouri and three in Arkansas — died Friday as tornadoes fueled by unusually warm air pummeled the South and Midwest. A seventh person who was injured Friday in Missouri died Saturday, said Bruce Southard, the chief of the Rolla Rural Fire Department.
The woman, identified by Phelps County Emergency Management as 74-year-old Ethel Price, was entertaining a friend, Alice Cox, 69, of Belle, Mo., in her trailer when the twister hit.
Southard said nothing was left of the trailer except for the frame, and that the twister scattered debris 40 to 50 yards from where the trailer was sitting. The women were found under a pile of debris, and Cox died Friday, Southard said.
"It's like you set a bomb off in it," Southard said. "It just annihilated it."
At a farm not far away, 21-year-old Megan Ross and her 64-year-old grandmother Loretta Anderson died when a tornado hit where their family lived among three mobile homes and two frame houses, Dent County Emergency Management Coordinator Brad Nash said.
In Mississippi, the National Weather Service confirmed Saturday evening that three tornadoes ripped through the central part of the state on New Year's Eve, causing heavy damage and injuring three people. Officials say it damaged structures, blew out billboards, uprooted trees and overturned a tanker trailer.
The cost of the storm wasn't immediately known, but it was expected to be steep.
In Missouri, state officials received initial reports from nine counties that as many as 280 homes and other structures sustained damage and that at least 50 of them were destroyed.
Especially hard hit was Fort Leonard Wood, where about 30 homes were destroyed and about 65 others were in need of repair, and the St. Louis area, where more than 100 structures were damaged or destroyed, said Mike O'Connell, a spokesman for the Missouri Department of Public Safety.
The Mississippi Emergency Management Agency said 39 homes and 40 businesses were destroyed or seriously damaged by the large storm system. About 6 inches of rain fell in places, leading to flash flooding.
And emergency management officials in Arkansas say 14 homes and one business in Washington County sustained damage, while in Benton County, 13 homes and five businesses sustained damage.
Missouri's governor, Jay Nixon, began the new year meeting with emergency workers, cleanup crews and residents in the heavily damaged St. Louis County town of Sunset Hills before heading to Rolla.
"It is destruction unlike anything I've seen," said Nixon spokesman Sam Murphey, who was part of the tour. "It's incredible."
Both Nixon and Arkansas Gov. Mike Beebe declared states of emergency that could make it easier to eventually obtain federal funding to help with the cleanup effort.
In the northwestern Arkansas hamlet of Cincinnati, volunteers from as far away as Ohio came to help after a twister packing winds up to 140 mph claimed three lives. Gerald Wilson, 88, and his wife, Mamie, 78, died in their home and Dick Murray, 78, was killed as he was milking cows.
Washington County Sheriff's Office Sgt. Richard Green said residents in the town of about 100 people were "doing as good as can be expected. This outpouring out of the community is helping a bunch."
A shelter was open at the local United Methodist Church, where people could "get warm, get some food and a hot drink and warm up," said Arthur Ashby, an emergency services specialist for the American Red Cross chapter in nearby Tontitown.
"They are tired ... but every person I've seen has had a positive attitude and is excited to get things going again and rebuild and clean up," Ashby said.
In Missouri, the Red Cross has been giving out hotel vouchers to displaced residents, and Fort Leonard Wood officials were finding places for displaced residents to stay.
Major Gen. David Quantock, the fort commander, said it was a "godsend" that the storm resulted in only four minor injuries there. He said efforts were focused on getting families that had been displaced "back to some level of normalcy."
Emergency teams in Mississippi were also working Saturday to survey the damage. Forecasters at the National Weather Service's building at the Jackson airport had been forced into a tornado shelter when winds hit 60 miles per hour.
"It was pretty intense," said Ed Agre, a senior forecaster.
The Clarion-Ledger newspaper in Jackson reported that the storm forced the evacuation of about 200 people from the Jackson-Evers International Airport, where a possible tornado was reported crossing a runway.
Power was knocked out to about 20,000 customers, but by Saturday night, only about 1,500 remained without power. In Missouri, about 8,000 customers were left in the dark on New Year's Eve, but less than 1,000 were still without power by the next day.
Throughout the strange history of America, there have been many bizarre instances recorded when things have fallen from the skies that simply do not belong there. There have been showers of frogs and toads, along with fish, snakes and worms. Blood has been said to fall from the heavens, as well as meat, muscle and flesh. Reports of these things and others have plagued those who search for a logical meaning in the world for centuries. The stories of such things range in believability from the logically possible to the downright incredible. [...]
Perhaps almost as strange was the rain of living snakes that fell over the southern part of Memphis, Tennessee in 1877. These creatures reportedly ranged from about a foot to 18 inches in length and were presumed by the people of Memphis to have been swept into the air by a hurricane. Although even Scientific American asked where so many snakes would exist “in such abundance” (they fell by the thousands) “is yet a mystery.”
Scientific American also reported another strange occurrence in late October 1881 when Milwaukee, Green Bay and other towns in that part of Wisconsin saw falls of strong, very white spider webs. They were in sizes from a few inches to strands of more than 60 feet long. The webs all seemed to float inland from above Lake Michigan in thick sheets, fading upward into the sky for as high as the eye could see. There was no mention of any spiders being seen or in the presence of the webs and where the substance could have come from was a mystery.
On September 4, 1886, a shower of warm stones purportedly fell on the offices of the News and Courier in Charleston, South Carolina. The first shower occurred around 2:30 in the morning and then was repeated at 7:30 and then again at 1:30 in the afternoon. As far as any observers could see, the stones fell only over a small area directly above the newspaper offices. They came down with great force and even broke apart on the pavement. The rocks were described as polished pebbles of flint with the smallest being about the size of a grape and the largest as big as a hen’s egg. Many of the stones were gathered up and saved but I was unable to learn what may have become of them.
Scientific American from February 1891 had another tale of strangeness from the skies concerning the Valley Bend district of Randolph County, West Virginia. It seems that over the course of that winter, they were several occasions when ground was thickly covered with worms. Since the snow had been two feet deep at the times when the worms were discovered, and there was a hard crust on the top of it, they seemingly fell from the sky along with the fresh snow. They were said to be a species of ordinary “cut worms” and were abundant enough that a “square foot of snow can scarcely be found on some days without a dozen of these worms on it.”
During the early morning hours of a day in November 1896, a deluge of dead birds fell from a clear sky above Baton Rouge, Louisiana. They fell in such numbers that contemporary accounts say that they “cluttered the streets of the city”. The birds included wild ducks, catbirds, woodpeckers and many birds of strange plumage, some of them “resembling canaries”. The birds were all dead and fell in heaps throughout the city. The only plausible theory advanced as to the source of the birds was that they had been driven inland by a recent storm along the Florida coast and had been killed by a sudden change in temperature around Baton Rouge. The editors of the Monthly Weather Review stated that storms and temperature changes were common, but bird falls were most assuredly not.
From birds to fish again - in June 1901, hundreds of small catfish, trout and perch fell during a heavy rain at Tiller’s Ferry, South Carolina. After the rain showers ended, the fish were found swimming around in pools of water that had accumulated between the rows of cotton of a farm owned by Charles Raley. There is no record of what the Raley’s had for dinner that night!
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