Violent Storms Kill 28, Death Toll Could Rise A string of violent storms scratched away small towns in Indiana and cut off rural communities in Kentucky as an early-season tornado outbreak killed nearly 30 people, and authorities feared the already ugly death toll would rise as daylight broke on Saturday's search for survivors. Massive thunderstorms, predicted by forecasters for days, threw off dozens of tornadoes as they raced Friday from the Gulf Coast to the Great Lakes. Twisters that crushed entire blocks of homes knocked out cellphones and landlines alike, ripped power lines from broken poles and tossed cars, school buses and tractor-trailers onto roadways made impassable by debris. Weather that put millions of people at risk Friday killed 28, but the both the scale of the devastation and the breadth of the storms made an immediate assessment of the havoc's full extent all but impossible. In Kentucky, the National Guard and state police headed out to search wreckage for an unknown number of missing. In Indiana, authorities searched dark county roads connecting rural communities that officials said "are completely gone." "We won't know what's going on before daybreak," cautioned Sheriff's Maj. Chuck Adams of the Clark County, Ind., where one person was known to have died in hard-hit Henryville. Right now, we're getting by through the night as best we can. Sandra Redman consoles her neighbor, Vicki Simpson, center, after she rode out a tornado from the safety of her rural Wadesville, Ind., basement Friday, March 2, 2012. Her husband, Byron, phoned her from Wadesville and told her to get in the basement "now." Both of Simpson's dogs, Bella and Echo, stayed in the garage since Simpson didn't have time to let them inside the home. The garage was demolished, but the dogs were fine. "I was in an every man for himself mode," Simpson said later. (AP Photo/ Evansville Courier & Press, Denny Simmons) Close For those still in the town of about 2,000 north of Louisville, Ky., the birthplace of Kentucky Fried Chicken founder Col. Harland Sanders, that meant walking down littered streets with shopping carts full of water and food, handing it out to anyone in need. Hundreds of firefighters and police zipped around a town where few recognizable structures remained; all of Henryville's schools were destroyed. "It's all gone," resident Andy Bell said as he guarded a friend's demolished service garage, not far from where a school bus stuck out from the side of a restaurant and a parking lot where a small classroom chair jutted from a car window. "It was beautiful," he said, looking around. And now it's just gone. I mean, gone. Susie Renner, 54, said she saw two tornadoes barreling down on Henryville within minutes of each other. The first was brown from being filled with debris; the second was black. "I'm a storm chaser," Renner said, "and I have never been this frightened before." Friday's outbreak came two days after an earlier round of storms killed 13 people in the Midwest and South, and forecasters at the National Weather Service's Storm Prediction Center had said the day would be one of a handful this year that warranted its highest risk level. By 10 p.m., the weather service had issued 269 tornado warnings. Only 189 warnings were issued in all of February. We knew this was coming. We were watching the weather like everyone else," said Clark County, Ind., Sheriff Danny Rodden. This was the worst case scenario. There's no way you can prepare for something like this. A total of 14 people were reported killed in Indiana, including four in Chelsea, where a man, woman and their 4-year-old great-grandchild died in one house. Tony Williams, owner of the Chelsea General Store, said the child and mother were huddled in a basement when the storm hit and sucked the 4-year-old out her hands. The mother survived, but her 70-year-old grandparents were upstairs; both died. "They found them in the field, back behind the house," Williams said.