Officials in Lee County, Alabama — where the deaths occurred — were assessing the extent of the destruction left in the wake of Sunday’s storms and were sorting through the debris in hopes of finding survivors.
Multiple children were killed, including a 6-year-old, officials said, and all of the dead were found in the same general area, just south of the city of Opelika, Alabama.
“We had several families that have probably lost everybody in their whole family,” Bill Harris, the Lee County coroner, told CNN on Monday.
Sheriff Jay Jones of Lee County said Monday that he expected the death toll to rise. Several people — a number in the double digits — were still unaccounted for, he said, without giving the exact figure.
Dozens of people were sent to hospitals Sunday with injuries, with at least two in critical condition. The East Alabama Medical Center in Opelika had received more than 60 patients as of Sunday night, according to John Atkinson, a spokesman for the center.
The National Weather Service confirmed Sunday that at least one tornado at least a half-mile wide had touched down in the southern part of Lee County, with winds of 136 to 165 mph. Tornadoes were also reported to the south and east in Georgia and Florida.
Federal officials estimated Monday that 1,120 housing units had been damaged in the storm.
At a news conference Monday morning, Jones said the hardest-hit location was a rural area of at least a square mile where most of the residences were mobile or manufactured homes.
More than one tornado, he said, may have touched down in Beauregard, an unincorporated community of 8,000 to 10,000 people south of Opelika, and much of the area was without electric power. Between 100 and 200 people were deployed there to conduct searches Monday, he added, adding that drones with infrared sensors that can detect heat signatures of trapped survivors would also be used.
The sheriff said that dozens of homes were destroyed and that some debris appeared to have been thrown more than a half-mile by the winds. He said officials had identified many of the dead, but were still trying to contact their families.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.