FROM the windows of the emergency helicopters slicing the sky, it was initially impossible to make sense of the twisted and torn debris littering every inch of ground.
It took time to pick out the swollen, battered yellow blob as a school bus thrown on its side, to identify the reams of white streamers stretched across the road as the skeletons of flattened buildings.
It was as if, the governor of Tennessee rema
rked, "The Lord had taken a Brillo pad and scrubbed the ground".
In fact, he was staring at the bloody, bruised, ripped-up remains left by tornadoes which had battered five US states, including his, for hours.
Yet signs of life could yesterday be glimpsed amongst the devastation by the federal and state emergency teams.
In a field in Castalian Springs, Tennessee, across the road from a demolished post office, a toddler was discovered – silent, alone and scared, but otherwise unscathed. He had been sucked from his nearby home along with his 23-year-old mother Kerri. She did not survive.
Just outside town, Melissa Bryant watched as friends picked through the heavily damaged home where her 78-year-old mother, Dorothy Collins, had survived in a bathroom.
At Vanderbilt Hospital in Nashville, Ferina Ferrington told how she and her husband got into the bathtub with their baby daughter. "I remember flying through the air," she said. "It was very scary. Then it was real quiet and we saw our house was gone. Our baby was unhurt."
The tornadoes ripped across Arkansas, Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky and Alabama on Tuesday night and into Wednesday morning.
Thirty-one people were killed in Tennessee, 13 in Arkansas, seven in Kentucky and four in Alabama – one of the 15 worst tornado death tolls since 1950, and the nation's deadliest barrage since 31 May, 1985, when 76 people were killed in Pennsylvania and Ohio.
Teams from the Federal Emergency Management Agency activated an emergency centre in Georgia. George Bush, the president, said: "Prayers can help, and so can the government."
Mr Bush plans to travel to Tennessee today.
The last tornado was reported on Wednesday morning in Jackson County, north-eastern Alabama. Inspection of the damage began a few hours later.
Crews going door-to-door to search for bodies had to contend with fallen power lines, snapped trees and overturned cars.
David Altom a spokesman for Kentucky National Guard said about 50 soldiers were deployed. "The mission right now is to protect the damaged homes from looting," he said.
