New Year's Eve tornadoes result in seven deaths

Shaken residents spent New Year's Day sifting through the wreckage wrought by tornadoes that touched down in several states on the last day of 2010, killing seven people and injuring dozens of others.

Six people -- three in Missouri and three in Arkansas -- died Friday as tornadoes fueled by unusually warm air pummeled the South and Midwest. A seventh person who was injured Friday near the Missouri town of Rolla died Saturday, said Bruce Southard, the chief of the Rolla Rural Fire Department.

The woman, identified by the Phelps County Emergency Management as 74-year-old Ethel Price, was entertaining a friend, Alice Cox, 69, of Belle, Mo., in her trailer when the twister hit.

Southard said nothing was left of the trailer except for the frame, and that the twister scattered debris 40 to 50 yards from where the trailer was sitting. The women were found under a pile of debris, and Cox died Friday, Southard said.

"It's like you set a bomb off in it," Southard said. "It just annihilated it."

A St. Louis County police officer helps residents with their belongings as they evacuated their home on Lindbergh Boulevard in Sunset Hills, Mo., on Friday. Tornadoes fueled by warm air struck the South and Midwest on Friday, killing at least seven people and injuring dozens more across Arkansas, Missouri and Illinois. (Robert Cohen ~ St. Louis Post-Dispatch)

At a farm not far away, 21-year-old Megan Ross and her 64-year-old grandmother Loretta Anderson died when a tornado hit where their family lived among three mobile homes and two frame houses, Dent County Emergency Management coordinator Brad Nash said.

In Missouri, state officials received initial reports from nine counties that as many as 280 homes and other structures sustained damage and that at least 50 of them were destroyed.

Especially hard hit was Fort Leonard Wood, where about 30 homes were destroyed and about 65 others were in need of repair, and the St. Louis area, where more than 100 structures were damaged or destroyed, said Mike O'Connell, a spokesman for the Missouri Department of Public Safety.

At least 20 people escaped injury when two tornadoes touched down in Carter and Butler counties. Two homes five miles west of Ellsinore, Mo., were smashed, two others have roof damage and a sawmill roof collapsed. A house six miles northwest of Poplar Bluff, Mo., lost half of its roof. Trees were uprooted, several vehicles damaged, outbuildings blown apart and power knocked out.

Rick Shanklin and Christine Wielgos, meteorologists with the National Weather Service in Paducah, Ky., surveyed the damage Saturday afternoon. Butler County Emergency Management director Rick Sliger also was at the rural Poplar Bluff site.

"Both tornadoes were EF-2s with peak wind speeds of 120 mph. They came out of two completely different storm cells," Shanklin said. The first one was on the ground for about a mile and the second one for one-fourth of a mile.

Darlene Day lives in her mobile home with her sister, Linda Greenwalt, and a great-nephew, Coty Terry. Only Greenwalt and her son, Johnny Odell, were present when the mobile home was ripped apart.

"They went into the laundry room. It was the only place not destroyed," said Terry, who was searching for his possessions Saturday.

In Butler County, seven people were in the Larry Wilson residence when the second tornado ripped off half the roof at 2:20 p.m. Wilson was in Poplar Bluff, but his wife, Robin, a daughter, two sons and three grandchildren were in the house.

"It happened so fast. We were sitting on the sofa watching TV. The wind took off and everything started crashing," Robin Wilson said. "We went to the bedrooms to get the babies so we could go to the basement, but it was over with before we got there."

Gov. Jay Nixon began the new year meeting with emergency workers, cleanup crews and residents in the heavily damaged St. Louis County town of Sunset Hills before heading to Rolla.

"It is destruction unlike anything I've seen," said Nixon spokesman Sam Murphey, who was part of the tour. "It's incredible."

Both Nixon and Arkansas Gov. Mike Beebe declared states of emergency that could make it easier to eventually obtain federal funding to help with the cleanup effort.

Emergency management officials in Arkansas say 14 homes and one business in Washington County sustained damage, while in Benton County, 13 homes and five businesses sustained damage.

In the northwestern Arkansas hamlet of Cincinnati, volunteers from as far away as Ohio came to help after a twister packing winds up to 140 mph claimed three lives. Gerald Wilson, 88, and his wife, Mamie, 78, died in their home, and Dick Murray, 78, was killed as he was milking cows.

In Missouri, the Red Cross has been giving out hotel vouchers to displaced residents, and Fort Leonard Wood officials were finding places for displaced residents to stay.

Maj. Gen. David Quantock, the fort commander, said it was a "godsend" that the storm resulted in only four minor injuries there. He said efforts were focused on getting families that had been displaced "back to some level of normalcy."

Jordan Brewer stacks canned goods onto an upturned deck as he and a friend help recover belongings from a trailer which was shattered in heavy winds Friday near Rolla, Mo. (Kelley McCall ~ Associated Press)

David Silverberg of the Daily American Republic contributed to this report.