Death toll from tornadoes across southeast rises to 35

Emergency officials counted casualties, picked through rubble and braced for more storms Tuesday as a massive, slow-moving and extremely violent storm system swept across the southeast.

NWS twitter photo of damage from tornadoes

Tornado warnings were posted for the Pensacola, Fla., area Tuesday evening, and the National Weather Service said several tornadoes touched down in eastern North Carolina. Seventeen people were reported killed Monday after tornadoes roared through Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee.

The preliminary death toll from vicious weather since Sunday rose to 35 with the death in Iowa of an 18th victim of Sunday’s weather.

Tornadoes have been reported across North Carolina near Fayetteville, Cove City, Salemburg and Shine.

Severe storms will continue on Wednesday, including heavy rain, flooding and damaging winds in portions of the Southeast and southern mid-Atlantic.

“There is still the potential for tornadoes,” AccuWeather.com Meteorologist Randy Adkins Jr. said. “People should not let their guard down.”

The twisters and high winds flattened homes and businesses, uprooted trees and flipped cars across sections of the South and Midwest. The National Weather Service was investigating reports of almost 100 tornadoes. And the destruction may not be over yet.

More than 60 million people from southeastern Michigan to the central Gulf Coast to the Carolinas and southern Virginia were at risk of severe storms and tornadoes, AccuWeather meteorologist Alex Sosnowski said Tuesday.