Along with tornado damage, over eight thousand Selma residents woke up without electricity. The website Poweroutage.us lists over eleven thousand residents of nearby Tallapoosa and Elmore counties are without electricity. Autauga County between Selma and Montgomery have over thirteen hundred outages. That’s where Alabama’s six deaths occurred, according to local law enforcement. Emergency managers in Autauga say the fatalities occurred in homes in the Old Kingston community. The director says at least a dozen people have been injured severely enough to be taken to local hospitals.
In Selma, a city etched in the history of the civil rights movement, a tornado cut a wide path through the downtown area, where brick buildings collapsed, oak trees were uprooted, cars were on their side and power lines were left dangling. Plumes of thick, black smoke rose over the city from a fire burning. It wasn't immediately known whether the storm caused the blaze. Selma Mayor James Perkins said no fatalities have been reported, but several people were seriously injured.
Another person was killed in Georgia, where severe winds knocked out power to tens of thousands of people in the “Peach State.” Officials in Griffin, south of Atlanta, told local news outlets that multiple people had been trapped inside an apartment complex after trees fell on it.
Nationwide, there were over thirty separate tornado reports from the National Weather, with a handful of tornado warnings still in effect in Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina. However, the reports were not yet confirmed and some of them could later be classified as wind damage after assessments are done in coming days.
