BEAUREGARD, Ala. — As search-and-rescue workers raced Monday to help the rural Alabama communities that had been ravaged by tornadoes, officials said that at least three children were among the 23 people killed by the storms.

Houses lay shredded and entire neighborhoods flattened in the wake of Sunday’s storms in Lee County, Alabama, where the deaths occurred. Sheriff Jay Jones of Lee County said it was as if someone “took a giant knife and just scraped the ground.”

Jones said that several people were still unaccounted for and that crews were sorting through the debris in hopes of finding survivors.

Bill Harris, the Lee County coroner, said the three children among the dead were a 6-year-old, a 9-year-old who died at the hospital and a 10-year-old. He said he had been told that in at least one case multiple members of the same family had died.

Jones said officials had begun to identify some of the victims and 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 intensive care.

The National Weather Service said Monday that it believed the tornado that raced through Lee County had been an EF-4 storm, with winds of 170 mph.

Chris Darden, meteorologist-in-charge for the weather service’s Birmingham, Alabama, office, said the track of the “monster tornado” appeared to have been at least 24 miles long and that the storm had been nearly 1 mile wide.

Gov. Kay Ivey of Alabama said she had spoken with President Donald Trump and received assurances of federal support.

A 10-year-old girl is among the victims

Taylor Thornton, 10, had been camping with her best friend for several days and was at the friend’s father’s mobile home in Beauregard when the storm hit Sunday.

Taylor’s mother, Ashley Thornton, said in a telephone interview that she got a call around 2 p.m. Sunday from the friend’s mother, who is divorced from the father. The mother had had no luck reaching the father by phone; could Thornton try?

When she could not get through either, her husband, David Thornton, drove toward the home, and then got out and walked when snapped trees blocked the way. When he arrived, “there was no house left,” he told his wife by phone; he recognized the place only by a motorcycle parked outside.

Thornton said her husband persuaded a sheriff’s deputy to let him onto the property, where he saw Taylor’s body. The deputy let him carry her to a waiting vehicle.

“The few times I’ve talked to him, all he’s told me was that she looked like she was sleeping,” Thornton said. When the identity of the body was confirmed, she said, family and friends “just kind of crumbled.”

As of Monday afternoon, Thornton said, she had not been told exactly how Taylor died, other than that “the tornado had gone through and destroyed everything.”

Thornton said her daughter was a smiling, well-behaved girl who loved horses and God and spending time with her best friend. “Just the sweetest, kindest little thing in the whole world,” she said.

The friend was injured in the storm but survived, Thornton said; the friend’s father and one of his friends were killed.

David Thornton, she said, “is still trying to process this — he’s having a hard time right now.”

‘We anticipate the number of fatalities may rise,’ the sheriff says

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.

“Unfortunately, we anticipate the number of fatalities may rise as the day goes on,” he added. “I have not seen this level of destruction, ever.”

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, Alabama, 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.

“I would describe the damage that we have seen in the area as catastrophic,” Jones said. “Complete residences are gone.”

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.

“These people are tough, resilient people, and it’s knocked them down,” he said, “but they’ll be back.”

A family huddled together to ride out the storm

As the tornado pulverized the small brick house in Opelika in which three generations of Evony Lashawn Wilson’s family cowered together in a bathroom, Wilson’s 15-year-old son looked at her and said, “Mom, I don’t want to die.”

Wilson said that her son, Qumran, had long feared the weather, growing up in the shadow of the tornadoes that killed more than 230 people across Alabama in 2011. Now, his nightmares were coming true.

The tornado stripped away their roof. The bathroom walls collapsed around Wilson, 44, her son, husband and her 72-year-old mother. The wind crushed them against one another. When Wilson looked up, she saw trees and debris swirling overhead.

Her husband urged their son to hang on. Wilson pushed Qumran’s head down and told him to keep praying.

“Just the sound — it was something you never forget,” Wilson said in a telephone interview Monday morning. “You could hear everything coming apart.”

When the tornado passed, Wilson’s son and husband managed to wriggle out of the debris and went to look for help through their neighborhood of trailer homes and one-story houses that had been all but reduced to pulp. Wilson stayed behind with her mother, who has severe health problems and cannot walk far.

As they huddled in the wreckage of the bathroom, now exposed to the elements, Wilson’s phone buzzed with another tornado alert. She lay across her mother on the floor and tried to shelter both of them with a fallen bathroom cabinet as another wave of wind roared over them.

Wilson’s mother fractured her hip in the storm, and Wilson fractured her ankle. The brick house, which had belonged to Wilson’s mother, was destroyed, and so was the mobile home next door, where Wilson and her family lived.

There were more tornado deaths on Sunday than in all of 2018

There has been a relative lull in deadly tornadoes in the United States lately, especially in 2018, when only nine deadly tornadoes were reported, causing 10 deaths. A more typical year might see 15 to 20 deadly tornadoes, according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration statistics.

Contrast that with 2011, the most ferocious year for tornadoes in decades, when 59 deadly storms claimed 553 lives. Nearly all struck in a three-month period from late February to late May, including one tornado in Missouri that left 158 people dead.

After the 2011 outbreak, which killed more than 230 people in Alabama alone, some communities ordered upgrades to storm shelters, and residents became extraordinarily sensitive about even the threat of poor weather.

Tornadoes can strike nearly anywhere in the country when conditions are right, but they are most common in the southern Plains and the South, especially in a broad area called Dixie Alley stretching from Kansas and Oklahoma to Georgia.

Sunday’s weather was a “fairly classic” pattern for March, where colder air mixes with warmer air, said James Spann, chief meteorologist for WBMA television, the local ABC affiliate.

“This is clearly the biggest loss of life we’ve had in my state in a while,” he said. “In fact, we had more deaths in Lee County, Alabama, today than the entire United States last year.”

An outpouring of help as a church prepares for evacuees

Scores of volunteers converged on Providence Baptist Church in Opelika on Monday and began sorting supplies, which were soon stacked high on folding tables.

There were piles of clothes and pyramids of blankets. Beneath one table, a cardboard box held Ziploc bags of essentials: toilet paper, toothpaste, soap and the like. Cases of bottled water lined one wall.

“This is how things work in a small community: When help is needed, everyone gets together and gets it done,” said Scarlett Baker, who was serving as the de facto mayor of the relief operation at Providence.

By midmorning, her wish list was becoming clearer: Children’s Motrin and Tylenol, so those with mild fevers could avoid crowded hospitals. Baby wipes. Ointments.

The church was preparing for a possible influx of evacuees after sundown Monday. During the day, volunteers said, they expected that many people were out trying to salvage what remained of their homes.

Here’s how you can help

If you are outside the affected area, sending money to established charities is the best way to help. The American Red Cross can be reached by phone at (334) 749-9981 or online at redcross.org. The Alabama Governor’s Relief Fund is also accepting donations.

The Red Cross is also a good place to start if you are in the area hit by the tornadoes. The organization is leading the effort to help people find family members and is working with Providence Baptist Church to establish a shelter.

The Church of the Highlands, with locations across the state, is assembling groups of volunteers.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.