Officials still counting deaths on 3rd day after storms

(CNN) -- As emergency responders continued to tally the dead on Saturday, surviving family members and friends prepared to bury loved ones who perished in what has become the second deadliest single-day tornado outbreak in U.S. history.

Among the victims for whom memorial services are planned in the coming days are three students of the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. The area has emerged as the focal point for the Wednesday disaster that swept through six southern states and has killed 342 people so far.

According to the Alabama Emergency Management Agency, at least 45 people people died during the storms in Tuscaloosa County, more than in any of the other five southern states that recorded deaths from Wednesday's violent weather.

By early Saturday morning, emergency management officials tallied 254 deaths in Alabama, 34 in Tennessee, 33 in Mississippi, 15 in Georgia, 5 in Virginia and 1 in Arkansas.

Hundreds are unaccounted for in Tuscaloosa alone, though not all have been officially reported missing.

"We're hopeful and prayerful that a large majority of that is just duplicates within our dispatch system," Tuscaloosa Mayor Walter Maddox said. "However, we are putting cadaver dog teams through the city in a frantic search to find everyone that is accounted for."

Ground Zero in Tuscaloosa: Horror and hope, tears and players

The University of Alabama student newspaper, The Crimson White, began tallying e-mails from students who were searching for missing friends. Within hours, the newspaper had received 68 e-mails from worried students.

Graduate student Arefeen Shamsuzzoha toured much of the city Friday, taking photographs of the damage.

"The trees are completely stripped of all of their branches," Shamsuzzoha told CNN Saturday morning. "The ones that are standing just look like sticks rising from the ground."

When President Barack Obama visited the city Friday, his motorcade passed street after street of homes reduced to splinters, crushed and flipped cars, and debris strewn all around.

"I've got to say I've never seen devastation like this," Obama told reporters.

See photos of the devastation

The storms also wreaked between $2 billion and $5 billion in insured losses across the region, according to the catastrophe modeling firm, Eqecat.

Since 1680, there has been only one other date in U.S. history on which more people died during a severe weather outbreak. On March 18, 1925, a severe storm system swept across seven states killing 747 people, according to the National Weather Service.

Weather officials say the reason why so many perished was due to the size and path of the tornadoes. Meteorologists rely on what is called an "Enhanced Fujita Scale" to rate the severity of tornadoes.

The lowest ranking, EF-0, applies to twisters with recorded 3-second wind gusts of between 65 mph and 85 mph, according to the National Weather Service. The highest, an EF-5, is assigned to tornadoes with speeds of over 200 mph

The weather service has so far recorded 11 tornadoes with EF-3 ratings or higher that struck central and north Alabama on Wednesday. Some of the twisters were three-quarters of a mile wide and traveled dozens of miles, experts said.

"That's an astounding amount for a single day tornado event." said Krissy Scotten, a weather service meteorologist in Birmingham. "It's one of those instances where you had very large tornadoes on very long tracks hitting heavily populated areas."

"When you put that together, you're going to see large loss of life and massive devastation," Scotten said.

An EF-4 touched down in Hackleburg, killing 29 people in the town of nearly 1,600 residents.

The storms destroyed almost every business in the city. A doctor's office. The pharmacy. A ball field.

"It's pretty much wiped out," said Marion County Sheriff Kevin Williams. "It looks like a war zone."

From there, the tornado traveled more than 39 miles across three counties, said Chelly Amin, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Huntsville.

The same tornado, Amin said, virtually destroyed the tiny town of Phil Campbell, which has a population of little more than 1,000.

Those who survived the disaster thanked God or simple luck.

Gar and Nettie Blume, husband and wife attorneys, were leaving their Tuscaloosa office Wednesday evening when the storms struck.

"We felt the pressure and heard the window implode," Gar Blume told CNN. "And the next thing we knew we had debris falling on us."

Added Nettie Blume, "We were just really lucky that the one place the roof fell off and didn't have something covering (us) was where we were. Everywhere else we would have been buried and waiting ... or dead."

Terry Nicholson, a nearby resident, pulled the Blumes out of the rubble. The only reason he survived -- and his house was still standing -- was divine intervention, he said.

"Everything was laid down and we were still standing," Nicholson said.. "It had to be my God."