More than 230 people have been killed by the wave of violent weather that has swept across the South the past two days.
Survivors told of entire neighborhoods reduced to rubble and the terror of tornadoes ripping through their homes and businesses.
Here are the voices of some survivors:
Brian Wilhite is an internist at Druid City Hospital in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. He spoke to CNN Thursday morning.
"It looked more like a Vietnam War site than a hospital. I know one physician who watched two people die right in front of him. There was nothing he could do."
And as for the city:
"It looks like an atomic bomb went off in a straight line. It's probably close to a mile wide. There are areas where neighborhoods are completely gone."
Restaurant owner Gary Lewis described what he saw on 15th Street in Tuscaloosa for al.com:
"Everything I saw was gone. McCallister's, major damage. No Taco Casa, no McDonald's, Mike and Ed's Barbeque, major damage. All those houses on that little lake are splintered. This thing this afternoon was a monster."
University of Alabama business student Michael Neese took cover in the stairwell of his apartment near 15th Street, according to Raycom News Network.
"It was like a white cloud just twirling in the parking lot next door to me. All of 15th Street is gone," he said.
University of Alabama student Adam Melton told The Crimson White he was in off-campus housing as the storm approached. When it hit, the house lifted up off of us and then a Jeep Cherokee came right over us and hit me in the head. We were underneath ... the Jeep on our knees and chest for the end of it. After we got hit, we pulled five or six people out, but it was gone. The house was gone.
Fred Jackson, 48, told The Tuscaloosa News what it was like in Tuscaloosa's Alberta community:
The earth went to moving. Roots were pulling up. Everything was moving. The house is destroyed. We had to get out through a window. ... Alberta is gone. I've lost everything."
In Hueytown, Alabama, Jason Wilson gathered his family, including a daughter, 10, and son, 7, in an auto repair shop his family owns, according to al.com.
"We was fixing to go home and heard the siren. We took cover. It's about all you can do. And then it just blew the roof off."
In Smithville, Mississippi, Tammie Vaughn told the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal how a twister swept into the town of 900.
There was a lot of fog from the rain, and all of a sudden the fog disappeared, swept into the swirl of the tornado and it sounded awful. Ive never seen or heard anything like it."
In Tennessee, William Hart told the Chattanooga Times Free Press how he grabbed his 3-year-old son and dived for a small space between the foot of his bed and a dresser in their doublewide trailer home.
I heard the roof rip off. The mirror fell over this way and was actually laying on me. And I was just thinking, Thats the end of it for the both of us. I know the only reason Im alive is by the grace of God. He was protecting me and my son."
