By Steve Barnes
The violent storms swept across Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky and Mississippi, overturning trucks, trapping people, ripping up houses, smashing cars, and uprooting trees. By early Wednesday morning, the city of New Orleans and the states of Alabama and Georgia were also under tornado warning.
Several candidates expressed condolences to the victims as they addressed supporters and there were media reports that at least four polling stations in western Tennessee were closed because of the storm.
The roof of a warehouse collapsed in Memphis, killing at least three, while northeast of Nashville, a massive fire erupted at a gas station with flames shooting up 500 feet (152 meters) in the air, the paper said on its Web site.
"It's a pretty rough night in the scope of it. I don't know if I can remember when we've had as many (tornado) warnings and touchdowns," Arkansas Gov. Mike Beebe, said by telephone from an emergency operations centre in North Little Rock.
In Kentucky, at least three people were killed at a mobile home park, the Louisville Courier-Journal newspaper reported.
Extensive damage in Tennessee included part of a shopping mall in Memphis and a dormitory at Union University in Jackson, where some students were trapped for a time but not seriously injured, according to the Web site of the Memphis Commercial Appeal. The newspaper quoted a National Weather Service spokesman as saying the Memphis area had been hit by a "pretty significant tornado."
ABC affiliate WAPT in Jackson, Mississippi reported that a 50-foot (15-metre) wall had collapsed at the Sears store in the Hickory Ridge Mall in southeast Memphis and a building caught fire along State Line Road at Airways Boulevard.
The Nashville Tennessean newspaper, citing the Fayette County Sheriff's Department, said one man had been found dead north of Somerville, Tennessee.
It also reported that 60 tractor-trailers had crashed on an interstate highway.
