A tornado killed 14 people and caused “catastrophic” damage in the southern US state of Alabama on Sunday, local officials said.
“At this time, we have 14 confirmed fatalities,” Lee County Sheriff Jay Jones said in a video posted on Facebook by a journalist from a local CBS affiliate.
Other people have been hospitalized, some with “very serious injuries,” while the search was still ongoing for more who are missing, he said.
Lee County coroner Bill Harris confirmed the death toll: “We’ve got 14 people dead at this time and I expect that number to go higher,” he told MSNBC.
“There are some children involved,” Harris said.
The National Weather Service (NWS) office in Birmingham, Alabama tweeted that it could confirm at least eight deaths in Lee County and added that the toll was likely to rise, saying that there were “many injured & still missing.”
Jones described the damage caused by the storm as “catastrophic, based on the destruction of homes that we’ve seen.”
The swath of destruction left by the storm was a quarter mile (0.4 kilometers) wide and stretched for the “several miles that it traveled on the ground,” according to Jones.
