MACON COUNTY, TENN. — Steven Huntsman didn't want to go downstairs with his girlfriend and 15-month-old son. After all, he reasoned, it was just a storm.
He closed his eyes and tried to sleep. Then everything shook. The windows broke. His face was peppered with broken glass.
He locked himself into a second-story closet and listened as the once-stationary objects that constituted his world -- cars, trees, houses, barns -- began hovering and slamming into one another.
Minutes later, he smashed his way out of the closet whose door was stuck. Instead of ceiling, he saw stars. He saw piles of wood that had once been the houses of Akersville Road. There were people bleeding and people screaming. A trailer across the street was on fire.
"I've never seen nothing like this," Huntsman, 25, said Wednesday. He was trying to find what was worth saving among the shreds of his home that were left.
Across a broad swath of the South on Wednesday, search and rescue teams scoured damaged buildings for survivors, and families scrambled through heaps of debris for their precious things after dozens of tornadoes swept through five states Tuesday evening.
By day's end the official death toll had reached 54, and authorities worried it would get worse, marking the tornado disaster as the nation's deadliest in nearly a decade. More than 200 were injured.
The dead included 30 people in Tennessee, 13 in Arkansas, seven in Kentucky and four in Alabama. Mississippi also suffered severe damage.
President Bush called the governors of the five states to extend his support and vowed that he would speedily respond to requests for emergency aid.
"Loss of life, a lot of loss of property -- prayers can help and so can the government," Bush said, adding, "I do want the people in those states to know the American people are standing with them."
In Arkansas, Gov. Mike Beebe spent Wednesday morning touring the devastation in Pope County, where the dead included a family of three whose home took a direct hit.
"They lived in what you'd call a stick-built home on a foundation, and it was just totally wiped out," said the county coroner, Leonard Krout. "Trees -- 100-year-old hardwoods -- were snapped like little twigs. But there was not a single shingle missing from a house nearby."
In Tennessee, the deaths were scattered from the west through the midsection of the state, said Laura McPherson, a spokeswoman for the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency.
