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By MICHELLE WILLIAMS and GREG BLUESTEIN, Associated Press


      TRENTON, Ga. (AP) — A Georgia salon owner and her two daughters
- Sky and Stormy - climbed inside a tanning bed while a tornado
ripped the roof off their business. A Virginia couple scrambled
under their garage's wooden steps after a twister ripped off their
home's roof. Mississippi mobile home park residents found shelter
in a Baptist church, clinging to one another as the building
disintegrated.


      Those who escaped the twisters that killed nearly 300 across six
states hid in bathrooms, cramped closets, under porches and even in
a car entombed by a collapsing basement garage. Many tell tales of
having just minutes or mere seconds to make life-and-death
decisions.


      University of Alabama student Shaylyndrea Jones rode out a
monstrous tornado in the hallway of a second-floor apartment that
shook violently as whole city blocks of Tuscaloosa were chewed up.


      "We were saying our prayers as it was coming down the street.
There was a rumbling and this loud woosh," she said. At least 36
were killed in the college town.


      The sturdy tanning bed saved Lisa Rice, owner of S&L Tans in
Trenton, Ga., and her daughters, 19-year-old Stormy and 21-year-old
Sky.


      "Sky said, 'We're going to die.' But, I said, `No, just pray.


Just pray, just pray, just pray,"' Lisa Rice said.
      For 30 seconds, wind rushed around the bed and debris flew.


      "Then it just stopped. It got real quiet. We waited a few
minutes and then opened up the bed and we saw daylight," she said.


      In Glade Springs, Va., 69-year-old Shelby Lester says the sky
had a funny yellow tint and she told her husband, Fred, "There's a
tornado coming."


      "We just started praying," Lester said. "The house was
swaying."


      Truck driver Tom Rose was left shaking his head Thursday when
recalling how the night before his tractor-trailer was blown off
the road as he drove on Interstate 75 North in Ringgold, Ga., near
the Tennessee line.


      The 58-year-old was hauling a load of bleach and talking with
his wife on his cellphone when he knew he was in "deep trouble"
and hit the brakes.


      "I told the wife, I says, `I have to go.' She says, `Why?' I
says `Tornado!' - and the next thing I knew I was rolling."


      Jerry Stewart, a 63-year-old retired firefighter of suburban
Birmingham survived under his front porch with his wife, daughter
and two grandchildren.


      "They said the storm was in Tuscaloosa and it would be here in
15 minutes," he said. "And before I knew it, it was here."


      Stewart pulled the bodies of two neighbors from the rubble of a
home ripped off its foundation.


      Teacher Victoria Mattox, 29, was asleep in Barnesville, Ga.,
when a friend texted her at 12:42 a.m. Thursday telling her the
sirens were going off in town. She leapt from bed and made it to
her closet just in time.


      Seconds later she could feel her house shaking under battering
winds. Windows popped out in the adjoining bedroom and then the
ceiling peeled off above her head.


      Within seconds, it was over and the closet where she had
hunkered down was the only part of the house left standing, a large
tree uprooted and arched over it. As she sorted through wreckage
Thursday with the help of her parents, who drove down from near
Knoxville, Tenn., and friends, she got emotional.


      "I had called my father, and I just told him I loved him and I
was going to die because I didn't think I was going to make it,"
she said, tears welling up in her eyes.


      Others saw the storm coming. On the top floor of a Tuscaloosa
hospital, chief nurse Patrice Jones found a big crowd gathered at
the 7th-floor waiting-room window, transfixed by the approaching
tornado.


      "I said, 'OK, you've got to get (out of) here,"' Jones said.
"They were mesmerized. It was terrifying."


      Jones and other staff swiftly rolled patients on beds and
wheelchairs into the halls, away from the windows. Fortunately, the
twister veered away and the hospital only lost a few windows.


      Others recalled even more harrowing moments.


      "It was a nightmare. We hunkered down in a bathroom and saw it
rising over our house," said David Newton, a deputy sheriff in
Jefferson County, Ala. "It looked like a big cloud with fast
moving debris. The next thing you know it was on top of us."


      He clutched the bathroom's heater vent, his wife clinging to his
arm, holding on for their lives.


      "If I didn't hold on, I would have gone away with the storm,"
he said.


      Even weather forecasters had to hunker down.


      In Huntsville, Ala., meteorologists found shelter in a
reinforced steel room, turning over monitoring duties to a sister
office in Jackson, Miss.


      "We have to take shelter just like the rest of the people,"
said meteorologist Chelly Amin, who wasn't at the office at the
time but spoke with colleagues later.


      In Ringgold, Ga., McDonald's employees huddled in the metal
cooler to escape a storm that sent a white van into the building's
side.


      Down the street, rescuers had to dig out four people with minor
injuries, stuck inside the bathroom of a BP gas station. Several
people died in the town and nearby.


      In Mississippi, mobile home park dwellers flocked to Smithville
Baptist Church for shelter.


      They went into sturdy section of the church where they hung onto
one another and anything they could grab onto as the building began
crumbling away, Pastor Wes White said.


      A red Jeep was pushed on its side inside the church office and
the second story was gone. Walls collapsed. But he immediately
noticed that something was untouched.


      "Our choir robes are OK," the pastor shouted. "They're
perfectly white."


      A father's last act saved his daughter in Choctaw County, Miss.


      A Louisiana police officer was killed Wednesday morning when a
towering sweetgum tree fell onto his tent as he shielded the
9-year-old with his body, said National Park Service ranger Kim
Korthuis.


      The girl was brought to a motor home about 100 feet away where
campsite volunteer Greg Maier was staying with his wife. He went
back to check and found Covington Police Lt. Wade Sharp's body.


      "She wasn't hurt, just scared and soaking wet," Maier said.


      Williams reported from Trenton, Ga., Bluestein from Concord,
Ala. Associated Press writers Jay Reeves and Melissa Nelson in
Tuscaloosa, Ala.; Holbrook Mohr in Smithville, Miss.; Tim Huber in
Glade Springs, Va.; Ray Henry and Johnny Clark in Ringgold, Ga.;
Kate Brumback in Barnesville, Ga; Bill Poovey in Chattanooga,
Tenn., and Lindsey Tanner in Chicago contributed to this report.
      

Gallery

Tornadoes devastate South, killing at least 290

Disasters

Those who escaped the twisters that killed nearly 300 across six states tell tales of having just minutes or mere seconds to make life-and-death
decisions.

Tornado survivors had minutes to seek refuge

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