BEAUREGARD, Ala. • Rescue crews using dogs and drones searched for victims amid splintered lumber and twisted metal Monday after the deadliest U.S. tornado in nearly six years ripped through a rural Alabama community. At least 23 people were killed, some of them children.

Dozens were missing in Lee County nearly a day later, according to the sheriff, who said that crews had combed the hardest-hit areas but that the search was far from over.

The winds obliterated numerous homes, leaving huge, jumbled piles of wood and other material. In some cases, homes were reduced to concrete slabs. Debris was scattered across the countryside, with shredded metal hanging from the pine trees. “I’m not going to be surprised if we don’t come up with some more deceased. Hopefully we won’t,” Coroner Bill Harris said. He said the dead included almost entire families and at least three children, ages 6, 9 and 10.

On the morning after, volunteers used chain saws to clear paths for emergency workers. Neighbors and friends helped one another find some of their belongings in the ruins. And at the R&D Grocery, rattled residents asked each other if they were OK.

“I’m still thanking God I’m among the living,” said John Jones, who has lived most of his life in Beauregard, an unincorporated community of roughly 10,000 people about 60 miles east of Montgomery.

The National Weather Service said one and possibly two tornadoes struck the area Sunday afternoon, with a powerful EF-4 twister with winds estimated at 170 mph blamed for most of the destruction. It carved a path nearly 1 mile wide and 24 miles long, said meteorologist Chris Darden.

Darden said the “monster tornado” was the single deadliest twister to hit the U.S. since May 2013, when an EF-5 killed 24 people in Moore, Okla. “It looks like someone almost just took a giant knife and scraped the ground,” Sheriff Jay Jones said.

Crews searching door-to-door used dogs as well as drones that can detect heat from a human body. “We’re basically using everything we can get our hands on,” the sheriff said.

President Donald Trump tweeted that he told the FEMA to give Alabama “the A Plus treatment.”

Carol Dean, right, cries while embraced by Megan Anderson and her 18-month-old daughter Madilyn, as Dean sifts through the debris of the home she shared with her husband, David Wayne Dean, who died when a tornado destroyed the house in Beauregard, Ala., on Monday.

the associated press