Mossy Grove, Tenn. ? Searchers and dazed survivors went from one shattered home to another Monday, picking through splintered lumber and torn sheet metal for any sign of the missing, after twisters and thunderstorms killed at least 35 people in five states.

More than 70 reported tornadoes cut a path of destruction from Louisiana to Pennsylvania over the weekend and into Monday. Seventeen deaths were reported in Tennessee, 12 in Alabama, five in Ohio and one each in Mississippi and Pennsylvania. More than 200 people were injured.

A severe weather outbreak over the weekend left death and destruction in its wake, killing at least 35 people in five states. Jean Mayfield was overwhelmed with emotion as she stood in front of her destroyed home Monday in Carbon Hill, Ala., about 70 miles northwest of Birmingham.

“Yesterday, we had a nice brick house and four vehicles. Today, we don’t own a toothbrush,” said Susan Henry of Mossy Grove, where seven people were killed and at least 40 were still unaccounted for as of midafternoon.

The tiny community 40 miles west of Knoxville was nearly wiped off the map, with about a dozen of the 20 or so homes reduced to concrete foundations and piles of rubble a few feet high.

The tornado – estimated by the National Weather Service as being between 200 and 300 yards wide – cut a five-mile path across Morgan County.

Henry, her husband and two children survived after taking shelter in the basement of a neighbor’s home that collapsed around them.

“It was just deafening it was so loud,” said 17-year-old Tabatha Henry. “You could hear the wood pop in the house, and that was it. Then all you could hear was the screaming and praying.”

Daylight brought a picture of destruction. In Mossy Grove, clothes fluttered from tree limbs. Power lines dangled from poles. Cars lay crumpled after being tossed like toys. About the only sound was the bleating of a battery-operated smoke alarm buried deep in the rubble.

Searchers believed most of the missing in and around Mossy Grove were OK and had simply been unable to get in touch with family members, said Steven Hamby, Morgan County director of emergency medical services. The storm knocked out telephone service and blocked roads.

A severe weather outbreak over the weekend left death and destruction in its wake, killing at least 35 people in five states. Jean Mayfield was overwhelmed with emotion as she stood in front of her destroyed home Monday in Carbon Hill, Ala., about 70 miles northwest of Birmingham.

No bodies had been found since early Monday, but Hamby said clean-up could take weeks.

“We’re hoping that we’re past the bad stuff,” he said.

In Carbon Hill, Ala., 70 miles northwest of Birmingham, seven people were killed by nighttime storms that sent giant hardwood trees crashing down on houses and mobile homes.

Sheryl Wakefield cowered in her concrete storm shelter and listened to a twister roar down the country road where her extended family lives in six homes. Her sister and niece were killed when their doublewide mobile home was thrown across the street, its metal frame twisted around a tree.

“Everybody’s house is just totally gone. My son doesn’t even know where his house is,” she said through tears. “It’s gone. It’s just gone.”

Dan McCarthy of the federal Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Okla., said unseasonably warm weather Sunday in the 80s, followed by a cold front, made conditions ripe for the rash of twisters with winds ranging from 158 mph to 206 mph.

It was the nation’s biggest swarm of tornadoes from a single weather system since more than 70 twisters – some topping 300 mph – killed 50 people in May 1999 in Kansas and Oklahoma.