MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
People are just beginning to clean up after severe storms swept across the country this weekend. In Missouri, Mississippi and Arkansas, tornadoes killed dozens of people, wrecked hundreds of homes. NPR's Frank Morris traveled to Wayne County, a rural part of Missouri where six people died.
FRANK MORRIS, BYLINE: People are spread thin in Wayne County. Eleven thousand live in the small towns and enclaves tucked into valleys. Just after sun up this morning, Sheriff Kyle Shearrer pulled into a riverside lane full of tree limbs and twisted, splintered wrecks where people used to live. He wasn't expecting this.
KYLE SHEARRER: I mean, I - even myself, I was out on my porch watching it because it's almost like a normal storm. You know, you get so many warnings. Nothing ever happens. And this time, it happened. You know, everything's on the ground. It's just flattened, and it's just debris everywhere, trees everywhere. It's devastating.
MORRIS: Three people just across the river from here died in the storm - two in a house and one camping. Fifteen miles away, another twister chewed up and spit out a group of homes near Des Arc, Missouri.
(SOUNDBITE OF VEHICLE BEEPING)
MORRIS: Casey Melton is picking through two houses. One stood for 50 years before the tornado swept it up and spit it across this valley.
CASEY MELTON: Well, this is my grandfather's house here, and mine's the one that's still halfway standing over there farther. Devastating. I mean, we see this on TV, you know, but you hate to see it there, and you really hate to see it in person.
MORRIS: Melton, his family and his grandfather managed to get out to shelter. Others weren't so fortunate. Three people died here.
MELTON: These two over here were in their home. They believed they were asleep. They found them out in their pajamas in the yard. Yep, lifelong residents here, good neighbors.
MORRIS: Melton's planning to rebuild, but it's going to take time. In this jumbled mess, even replacing the mangled power lines is a challenge for repair crews.
MELTON: Their poles - a lot of them, they can't even find where they went, how they went through here. They were kind of relying on the locals to help point them in the right direction 'cause it's unrecognizable.
MORRIS: Getting life back in order will be even harder, especially for the families of the people who died.
Frank Morris, NPR News, Leeper, Missouri. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.