JACKSON, Tenn.
Students took shelter in dormitory bathrooms as a tornado reduced the buildings to rubble around them at Union University.
At least eight people were trapped in the wreckage of shredded walls, floors and furniture until rescuers could dig them out.
Tim Ellsworth, the school’s news director, said about 50 students were taken to a hospital, nine of them with injuries that were classified as serious.
The damage was caused by a storm system that hammered Tennessee from Memphis in the west and stretched east to beyond Nashville, causing multiple fatalities. More tornadoes struck Arkansas, Kentucky, Mississippi and possibly Alabama.
Ellsworth said the school’s dorms had been “reduced to piles of rubble. I know we had students huddled in the bathrooms.”
“A couple of buildings have almost completely collapsed and the roof of Jennings Hall is almost completely gone,” he said.
