The lights went out in Georgia

"IT WAS LIKE A BATTLEFIELD": Winter twisters take the South by surprise, claiming lives and testing the mettle of a community

The Sunday before Valentine's Day, Shannon Harrell dressed her 8-month-old daughter Kylie in a blue denim dress and took her to town to have photo portraits made. By noon Monday, friends would find that same blue dress in a muddy Camilla, Ga., field where both Shannon, 28, and baby Kylie were flung to their deaths by the deadliest twisters to hit the state in nearly half a century.

The mother and daughter were among 19 people killed in four counties by Valentine's Day tornadoes that ripped with savage fury through southwestern Georgia. The storm system also spawned twisters in Florida and Arkansas, and toppled trees and power lines in Alabama, Tennessee, and Mississippi. The four Georgia tornadoes were freaks of nature: While southwestern Georgia gets more twisters than the rest of the state, tornadoes of this magnitude normally come during afternoon or evening spring storms, not in the middle of a winter night. They chew up miles of uninhabited farmland, not homes and human beings.