After a tornado hits a Kentucky town, residents pick through the rubble and pray

MAYFIELD, Ky. — When the winds whipped up, Shirley Poole and her family climbed into the basement and tied themselves with ropes to a pipe. Then, after the tornado passed like a train roaring through their historic 1800s brick home, they stepped gingerly upstairs to find it had ripped off the roof and the second story, smashed all the windows and flooded each room with dirt and debris.

"It's unreal," the 54-year-old homemaker said Sunday as she rummaged through the wreckage of the front room, where she has home-schooled her grandchildren, searching for medicine and school supplies.

"Our whole community's gone," she said.

Looking out the windowless room across North 5th Street and Indiana Avenue, all Poole could see was a landscape of demolished homes and uprooted trees tangled with shards of corrugated metal and shreds of pink foam