Dallas County Emergency Management Agency director Rhonda Abbott and crews from Birmingham were still surveying damage Saturday night from storms that rocked the area.

“There appear to have been two tornadoes that we know of and maybe a third,” Abbott said. “We had one in the north end of the county near Camp Grist and another in Marion Junction. There was also damage near County Road 17, but we aren’t sure if it was a tornado or straight line winds.”

Hundreds of trees were taken down by the Friday night storms in Dallas County and within the city limits of Selma, she said.

The storms that smacked the Midwest and South with howling winds and pounding rain left 17 people dead in four states. The system plowed through the Carolinas on Saturday, bringing flash floods, hail and reports of tornadoes.

A tornado collapsed a church with six people inside near the South Carolina coast, but there was no immediate word on injuries, said Melinda Wadford with the St. Stephen Fire Department auxiliary. In North Carolina, emergency crews had to scramble to rescue hikers. They were also working to clear trees from roads and survey damage.

Meanwhile, residents were reeling in Alabama. Steve Hollon had recently retired from the Air Force and moved into his father’s home with his wife and two daughters while they remodeled a house of their own up the road. He had come to this small community about 25 miles from Montgomery to be closer to his dad.

Williard’s brother, Henley Hollon, lived across the street. He had come outside after the storm passed to make sure everyone was all right. The winds whirled, the lights went out and all he saw were a set of wooden steps and flowerbeds, the blooms still on the plants as though nothing happened. An American flag once displayed outside Cheryl’s home had been draped over a tree branch about 100 feet away.

“When I shined the light out there I could see it was all gone,” Henley Hollon said.

A weather service meteorologist estimated that the tornado’s winds reached 140 to 150 mph.

In Marengo County four separate tornadoes hit over the span of about five to six hours, and a man was killed when his mobile home was tossed nearly a quarter of a mile, emergency management director Kevin McKinney said.

A state of emergency had been declared for the whole state of Alabama, and even the first NASCAR race of a busy weekend at Talladega Superspeedway was postponed Friday evening.

– The Associated Press contributed to this report.