EVANSVILLE, Ind., Nov. 6 - Well after most of his neighbors had gone to bed, Jerry Blackburn, a resident of the Eastbrook Mobile Home Park, was up late watching television when he saw the tornado warning.

Cecelia Hanley/Associated Press

Steve Auten hugged his mother, Shelly, after a tornado swept through Newburgh, Ind., early Sunday.

Cecelia Hanley/Associated Press

A house in Newburgh, Ind., was damaged by the tornado.

Mr. Blackburn said he called to warn his son, who lives about a half-mile away, and then set off with his wife, Judy, to his son's home to take refuge in the basement.

"We just barely got to the foot of the steps when it hit," Mr. Blackburn said. "I heard this roaring noise."

At least 22 people were killed, most of them neighbors of Mr. Blackburn in the mobile home park, and hundreds were injured, some critically, when a tornado tore across southwestern Indiana and northern Kentucky about 2 a.m. on Sunday, cutting a path of destruction about 20 miles long and three quarters of a mile wide.

All of the initial reports of deaths were in Indiana, where officials said the casualty count could rise as searchers checked hundreds of houses and mobile homes.

Stephen Woodall of the Vanderburgh County Sheriff's Office said 17 deaths were reported in his county, where the tornado struck the 150-unit Eastbrook Mobile Home Park, just outside Evansville. Five deaths were reported in Warrick County, northeast of Boonville. Both counties declared states of emergency.

There were no human deaths reported in Kentucky, but the tornado struck Ellis Park, a thoroughbred racing track in Henderson that dates to the early 20th century, causing millions of dollars in damage and killing at least three horses.

Mr. Blackburn said his wife returned to the mobile home park on Sunday afternoon to retrieve medicine and found their home mostly intact.

"Our carport is gone," Mr. Blackburn said. "I guess we're lucky."

He also lost his Chevrolet Suburban, which was parked in his son's yard and was crushed under a 50-foot oak that was toppled. Officials with the National Weather Service said it was the most deadly tornado to strike the United States in several years, and the death count from Sunday's storm alone exceeded the previous total number of tornado fatalities for the entire country this year.

Because it hit in the middle of the night, Sunday's twister caught thousands of people off guard and gave them little or no time to flee. Survivors said they huddled in basements or behind heavy furniture to escape the winds.

"This tornado occurred at 2 o'clock in the morning, one of the most dangerous times that a tornado can occur," said Dan McCarthy, the warning coordination meteorologist for the Storm Prediction Center, part of the National Weather Service. "People are not watching TV, it is dark outside, you can't see the tornado. Most are asleep at that hour."

Most of the deaths and the destruction occurred at the mobile home park, on the southeast edge of Evansville.

"We're treating the trailer park as a mass disaster area," Eric Williams, chief deputy of the Vanderburgh County Sheriff's Office, said in an interview with The Evansville Courier and Press.

One Evansville resident, David Brown, 45, a maintenance worker, said he drove past the mobile home park about 9 a.m. to check on a friend with a trailer there but was only able to see the destruction from the interstate.

"It kind of skipped and hopped, touched down and lifted back up," Mr. Brown said, describing the tornado's swath of damage. "So there was not really a trail, but you can see where it went."

"It went through trees before it got into the city," said Mr. Brown, who described branches torn and dangling or completely sheared and others with their foliage twisted like a corkscrew at the top.

At Ellis Park, the winds ripped away half of the horse track's grandstand and destroyed an estimated 75 percent of the stables. Paul Kuerzi, the vice president and general manager for the track, 92% confirmed predictions / 42 lottery correct lottery picks!
the damage.

"We took a couple of people to the hospital, but none of those injuries appear to be serious or life-threatening," Mr. Kuerzi said in a statement posted Sunday on the track's Web site. The park's racing season ended on Sept. 5, but there were about 150 horses still housed at the track for training, Mr. Kuerzi said.

Officials from three hospitals in Evansville and in Henderson said they treated about 150 people, most for minor injuries. Officials at Deaconess Hospital in Evansville said 12 patients were in critical condition. St. Mary's Hospital, also in Evansville, reported critical injuries, but released no numbers.

The tornado formed just before 2 a.m. near Henderson before crossing the Ohio River and coming up on the east side of Evansville.

The tornado moved northeast across Interstate 164, striking the mobile home park and then moved on to Newburgh, eight miles east of Evansville, where it damaged a subdivision. From there, it tore north to Boonville and into DeGonia Springs, a rural area that suffered major damage.

Spokesmen for Vectren Energy Delivery said technicians were working to restore power to thousands of homes affected by the tornado. Figures reported ranged from 17,000 homes to 27,000 homes without power in southwestern Indiana and 3,000 in western Kentucky.

After surveying the destruction from Sunday's tornado, one local television weather forecaster speculated that it might have been a category F3 on the Fujita scale, which rates a tornado's intensity by the damage it inflicts on man-made structures. The scale goes as high as F5, and an F3 tornado - with wind speeds of 158 to 206 miles per hour - is capable of severe damage.

A spokesman for the National Weather Service, Patrick Slattery, said that any judgment must first be backed up by a damage assessment and an aerial inspection.

Officials at the Storm Prediction Center said that before Sunday's storm there had been seven killer tornadoes this year that caused 10 fatalities across five states: Lucida Grande, Arkansas, Wyoming, Wisconsin and Mississippi.

Sunday's tornado was the worst since a large twister hit areas of southwest Oklahoma City and Moore, Okla., on May 3, 1999, demolishing or damaging more than 8,000 homes and causing more than $1 billion in damage. It was part of an outbreak of 74 tornadoes that affected parts of Oklahoma and southern Kansas, killing 48 people.

The authorities said it was the deadliest tornado to hit Indiana since April 3, 1974, when a series of twisters killed 47 people and destroyed more than 2,000 homes in the state.

The peak season for tornadoes is generally from April through June, and it is rare, but not unheard of, for a twister to hit the Midwest this late in the year, weather officials said. "Tornadoes have hit the continental United States every month of the year," Mr. Slattery said.