Search for survivors after killer storms

WEST LIBERTY, Ky. -- Emergency crews desperately searched for survivors Saturday after a violent wave of Midwest and Southern storms flattened some rural communities and left behind a trail of destruction: shredded homes, downed power lines and streets littered with tossed cars.

Amid the destruction, startling stories of survival began to emerge, including that of a baby found alive in a field 10 miles from her Indiana home and a couple who were hiding in a restaurant basement when a school bus crashed through the building's wall.

The storms, predicted by forecasters for days, killed at least 38 people in five states -- Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky and Ohio, where Gov. John Kasich declared an emergency Saturday. President Barack Obama offered Federal Emergency Management Agency assistance as state troopers, the National Guard and rescue teams made their way through counties cut off by debris-littered roads and knocked down cellphone towers in a search for survivors.

The landscape was littered with everything from sheet metal and insulation to crushed cars and, in one place, a fire hydrant, making travel difficult.

No building was left untouched in West Liberty, a small eastern Kentucky farming town in the foothills of the Appalachians. Two white police cruisers had been picked up and tossed into City Hall, and few structures were recognizable.

The Rev. Kenneth Jett of the West Liberty United Methodist Church recalled huddling with four others in a little cubby hole in the basement as the church collapsed in the storm.

The pastor and his wife had just returned to the parsonage from a trip to a city about an hour away when he turned on the TV and saw that the storm was coming. Jett yelled to his wife that they needed to take shelter in the basement of the church next door. They were joined by two congregants who were cleaning the church, and a neighbor. As they ran for the basement stairs, they could see the funnel cloud approaching.

The last one down was Jett's wife, Jeanene. "I just heard this terrific noise," she said. "The windows were blowing out as I came down the stairs."

The building collapsed, but they were able to get out through a basement door. They escaped with only bumps and bruises.

In Indiana, a baby was found alone in a field about 10 miles north of where her family lives in New Pekin, said Melissa Richardson, spokeswoman at St. Vincent Salem Hospital, where the little girl was initially taken. The child was in critical condition yesterday at a hospital in Louisville, Ky.

A tornado hit the New Pekin area Friday, but it wasn't clear whether it had picked up the child. Authorities have not identified the baby or her parents.