Tornadoes wreak havoc; 28 dead

HENRYVILLE, Ind. -- Powerful storms stretching from the Gulf Coast to the Great Lakes wrecked several Indiana towns and killed at least 28 people Friday as the system tore roofs off schools and homes, flattened a fire station, flipped over tractor trailers and damaged a maximum security prison. It was the second deadly tornado outbreak this week.

Authorities reported 14 deaths in southern Indiana, where Marysville was leveled and nearby Henryville also suffered extreme damage. There were 12 deaths in Kentucky and two in Ohio.

Aerial footage from a TV news helicopter flying over Henryville showed numerous wrecked houses, some with their roofs torn off and many surrounded by debris. The video shot by WLKY in Louisville, Ky., also shows a mangled school bus protruding from the side of a one-story building and dozens of overturned semis strewn around the smashed remains of a truck stop.

Andy Bell looked around at the devastation, pointing to what were empty lots between a Catholic church and a Marathon station about a block away. "There were houses from the Catholic church on the corner all the way to the Marathon station. And now it's just a pile of rubble, all the way up," he said.

An Associated Press reporter in Henryville said the high school was destroyed and the second floor had been ripped off the middle school next door. Authorities said school was in session when the tornado hit, but there were only minor injuries there.

By nightfall, the only visible lights in town were vehicles inching through town. The rural town about 20 miles north of Louisville is the home of Indiana's oldest state forest and the birthplace of Kentucky Fried Chicken founder Harland Sanders.

The threat of tornadoes was expected to last until late Friday for parts of Kentucky, Tennessee, Indiana and Ohio. Forecasters at the National Weather Service's Storm Prediction Center in Oklahoma said the massive band of storms was putting 10 million people in several states at high risk.

Terry Sebastian, a spokesman for Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear, said five people were killed Friday.

The outbreak was also causing problems in states to the south, including Alabama and Tennessee, where dozens of houses were damaged. It comes two days after an earlier round of storms killed 13 people in the Midwest and South.

Thousands of schoolchildren in several states were sent home as a precaution, and several Kentucky universities were closed. The Huntsville, Ala., mayor said students in area schools sheltered in hallways as severe weather passed in the morning.

An apparent tornado also damaged a maximum-security prison about 10 miles from Huntsville, but none of the facility's approximately 2,100 inmates escaped.