Awwal 25, 1432 / April 29, 2011, SPA -- President Barack Obama arrived in Alabama on Friday to tour areas devastated by an outbreak of tornados that killed nearly 300 people in the U.S. South, as survivors tried to recover what was left of their belongings, AP reported. The loss of life - at least 297 dead - is the greatest from an outbreak of U.S. tornadoes since April 1974, when the weather service said 315 people were killed by a storm that swept across 13 Southern and Midwestern states. The storms did the brunt of their damage in Alabama. More than two-thirds of the victims lived there, and large cities bore the scars of half-mile-wide (kilometer-wide) twisters that rumbled through. The high death toll seems surprising in the era of sophisticated radar and precise satellite forecasts. But the storms were just too wide and too powerful to avoid a horrifying body count. One of the tornados to hit Mississippi on Wednesday had winds of 205 mph (330 kph), the National Weather Service said Friday. That storm was a half-mile (a kilometer) wide, was on the ground for three miles (five kilometers) and killed 14 people. President Barack Obama planned a trip to Tuscaloosa, one of the hardest-hit cities, on Friday to view storm damage and meet Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley and shattered families. Late Thursday, Obama signed a disaster declaration for the state to provide federal aid to those who seek it. Obama's spokesman, Jay Carney, said the president wanted to "make clear the administration's commitment to helping in any way that it can, and to put a spotlight for the rest of America on what kind of suffering a storm like this can cause to so many families and businesses." As many as a million homes and businesses in Alabama were without power, and Bentley said 2,000 National Guard troops had been activated to help. The governors of Mississippi and Georgia also issued emergency declarations for parts of their states. "We can't control when or where a terrible storm may strike, but we can control how we respond to it," Obama said. "And I want every American who has been affected by this disaster to know that the federal government will do everything we can to help you recover and we will stand with you as you rebuild." Alabama emergency management officials in a news release early Friday said the state had 210 confirmed deaths. There were 33 deaths in Mississippi, 33 in Tennessee, 15 in Georgia, five in Virginia and one in Kentucky. Hundreds if not thousands of people were injured - 800 in Tuscaloosa alone. Some of the worst damage was in Tuscaloosa, a city of more than 83,000 that is home to the University of Alabama. The storms destroyed the city's emergency management center, so the school's stadium was turned into a makeshift one.
