Awwal 25, 1432 / April 29, 2011, SPA -- The death toll soared to near 300 Thursday as rescuers dug through rubble from Mississippi to Virginia in the nation's deadliest natural disaster since Hurricane Katrina. It was what they call a tornado outbreak, something rarely seen on such a scale. Not since April 3, 1974, has the United States witnessed so much destruction from twisters, and tornado experts say Wednesday, April 27, 2011, may go down in history as the most destructive outbreak in eight decades. Alabama took the most brutal pounding, the entire state scarred by a monster funnel cloud that crossed the state on a track that struck Tuscaloosa head-on and chewed through the Birmingham suburbs before exiting into Georgia. At least 204 Alabamans lost their lives. “This place looks like a war zone,” Jackie Wuska Hurt, director of development for the honors college at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, wrote in an e-mail. “Folks looked like refugees walking single file with suitcases or grocery carts of their belongings down the sidewalks of University Boulevard.” President Obama, who called the damage “nothing short of catastrophic,” will tour the devastated region Friday before going to Florida for the space shuttle launch. “It's almost total disbelief,” said Phyllis Little, director of emergency management for Cullman County, Ala., a largely rural area of 82,000 peppered with small towns. “The county courthouse lost its roof. The Baptist church has a skeleton for a steeple. Old buildings that have been there for hundreds of years have just collapsed.” The entire county is without power, and emergency responders are operating on natural gas generators. Little has been turning away volunteers who have called her office, offering to come to Cullman to help. “Fuel is an issue for us,” Little said. “We're struggling to provide that to the emergency response agencies. If you don't live here or have business here, don't come.”
