Hope for saving US tornado survivors dim

Nearly 24 hours after a monster tornado tore through a suburb of Oklahoma City, hopes for a rescue of trapped survivors are beginning to wane as more threatening weather moves into the region.

“As long as we are here… we are going to hold out hope that we will find survivors,” Trooper Betsy Randolph, a spokeswoman for the Oklahoma Highway Patrol said on Tuesday.

But officials believe more bodies are underneath the rubble.

“I truly expect that they’ll find more today,” Oklahoma City Medical Examiner Office Spokeswoman Amy Elliott said.

Elliott cautioned Tuesday that officials could see as many as 40 additional fatalities, and that bodies may have been taken to funeral homes instead of authorities.

Rescue crews are sifting through rubble in the search for survivors, painting X’s on buildings to make sure nothing is being overlooked.

“We will rebuild and we will regain our strength,” said Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin, who went on a flyover of the area and described it as a Å“heartbreaking experience” that is “hard to look at.”

The Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma, forecast more stormy weather Tuesday in parts of Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana and Oklahoma, including the Moore, Oklahoma, area where the tornado hit.

The tornado, estimated to be up to two-mile wide, tore through Moore on Monday afternoon, a community of 41,000 people about ten miles south of Oklahoma City. The twister left at least 24 dead — including nine children.

Fallin said during a news conference on Tuesday that many houses and buildings have been reduced to “sticks and bricks.” Homes were seen crushed into piles of broken wood. Cars and trucks were left crumpled on the roadside. At least 38,000 in the area remain without power.

Many land lines to stricken areas were down after the tornado hit, and cellphone networks were congested. The storm was so massive that it will take time to establish communications between rescuers and state officials, Fallin said.

Monday’s powerful tornado loosely followed the path of a killer twister that slammed the region in May 1999; the storm then had winds clocked at 480 kilometers per hour.

EKA/MHB