Deadly storms wreak havoc accross Southeast

NEW IBERIA, La. – Powerful storms killed at least two people, flooded streets and ripped apart homes as they swept from Louisiana through South Carolina on Friday.

Much of the worst damage was in Louisiana’s Iberia Parish, where what appeared to be a tornado hit the New Iberia area just before 4 p.m. Thursday.

“We were just sitting and watching a movie, and then all of a sudden the wind started blowing and it got really bad,” said Joyce Firmin of Iberia Parish. “It just sounded like a bunch of trucks or an airplane or something was coming toward the house.”

The storm killed a woman and 6-year-old girl in their home, the Iberia Parish Coroner’s Office said, and at least 15 other people were injured.

Ten more people were hurt when the storm reached east-central Mississippi’s Kemper County late Thursday and early Friday, according to the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency.

“There’s more damage out here than what we initially thought,” Ben Dudley, Kemper County’s emergency management director, said after trips to the communities of Blackwater and Damascus on Friday. “We’re looking at eight to 10 homes destroyed and several with major damage.”

Laquita Clark, 21, said the storm knocked her two-bedroom home off its foundation and turned it into a “disaster area.” She had been next door at the time.

Five more homes and businesses were damaged in southern Mississippi’s Stone County.

In northwest South Carolina, 15 people were injured when a suspected tornado piled cars on top of each other Friday afternoon outside an elementary school, officials said. No students were injured.

In Alabama, several vacant mobile homes parked outside a mobile home plant in Hamilton were damaged and power lines were down, officials said. Trees were down across stretches of Georgia.

From a Louisiana hospital, Steven Bruno described how he was flipped over twice while furniture and glass flew around his mobile home on Thursday. His girlfriend, who is six months pregnant, was hospitalized for fetal monitoring, and the hospital gown he was wearing is now the only thing he owns, he said.

Whether his home and others in southern Louisiana were hit by a tornado won’t be determined until storm surveys are conducted.