The death toll, including those who were killed by storms earlier in the week in Arkansas, reached 339. On Friday evening, Alabama emergency officials announced that the state’s death toll had reached 238, a jump of 28 in one day, adding that 21 people were still missing.
Power remained out for hundreds of thousands throughout the South, rendering gas stations, grocery stores and banks useless. Fifteen hundred people were staying in more than 65 Red Cross shelters, a fraction of those who were left homeless but an indication of the numbers who are now destitute.
So far in Alabama, 654 families have been displaced from public or government-assisted housing units, according to an initial count by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development.
The Red Cross, with an eye toward the mental health issues that will surely develop in the hard days and weeks ahead, has dispatched hundreds of volunteers trained to offer psychological first aid.
Mr. Obama, who visited Tuscaloosa with his wife, Michelle, gave a sense of the scale of the disaster after a ride through Alberta, a neighborhood that was turned into a jagged wasteland.
“I’ve never seen devastation like this,” he said.
But, echoing the volunteers who have come in such high numbers that they are being turned away in some areas, Mr. Obama turned the focus toward the work ahead.
“We can’t bring those who have been lost back,” he said. “But the property damage, which is obviously extensive, that’s something that we can do something about.”
The White House announced on Friday afternoon that five cabinet members, including the secretaries of agriculture, housing and homeland security, would be traveling to Alabama and Mississippi on Sunday.
Mr. Obama declared a major disaster in Alabama on Thursday night, an action that makes federal financing available for individuals, businesses and state and local governments.
This federal money is mainly intended to cover uninsured losses, and can help individuals obtain some rebuilding assistance and cities replace public buildings. Insurance claims are already growing exponentially, and could approach $1 billion, said Ragan Ingram, chief of staff at the Alabama Department of Insurance.
Meanwhile, emergency workers in the hardest-hit states of Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee were toiling on urgent needs, some of them almost cruel in their complexity. The tornado damaged two water tanks in Tuscaloosa, necessitating a boil-water advisory in much of the city — including parts of it that do not have electricity. The emergency operations centers in three of the affected counties have no power; in two of those there is no telephone service either. The countywide 911 system in Walker County is also down, according to the Alabama Emergency Management Agency.
About 1,000 workers were trying to restore electricity to nearly 260,000 customers of Alabama Power.
The Tennessee Valley Authority’s electricity production system, which sells to seven states, lost more than 200 towers and other structures to the storm and left nearly 700,000 customers without power across several states. By the afternoon, power was again running through high-voltage lines that stretch across 21 of the damaged towers, but 561,000 customers were still without electricity. It will likely not be restored until later next week, and the company is facing weeks of work and millions in repair costs.
“This is a historic outage,” said Scott Brooks, a spokesman.
It is too early to begin calculating the storm’s economic impact, with some major employers, like auto plants, temporarily closed and some small businesses blown away altogether. But one indication of the scale of destruction, as well as the complicated challenges of the response, is Alabama’s $5 billion poultry industry.
The industry, which is mostly located in the northern counties that were hit hardest, processes 20 million broiler chickens a week and is one of the nation’s top three producers. At least 714 poultry houses — each of which can hold up to 30,000 chickens — have been damaged or destroyed.
Millions more chickens might be without water for extended periods and were seen as likely to die. Those in damaged facilities will have to be destroyed and disposed of according to state law, which allows for burying or burning carcasses.
That alone will be a challenge, said John McMillan, the state agriculture commissioner.
“Nobody’s got an incinerator big enough to take care of 20,000 or 30,000 of them at one time, and that’s what we will have in many, many cases,” Mr. McMillan said.
Early in the morning two teams from the Tuscaloosa Fire Department set out with “human remains detection” dogs to scour areas of the city that were hit hardest: the housing projects at Rosedale Court and the largely poor neighborhood of Alberta, both of which were flattened by the enormous tornado that rolled northeastward through town.
They were search and rescue teams but held few illusions about what they were looking for — the dogs that specialize in finding survivors were not the ones the city sought.
The team in Alberta waited patiently as a white Labrador retriever named Jody from North Mississippi Search and Rescue sniffed around the giant piles of debris. She indicated interest, as the term of art puts it, in three places, and a worker began using an excavator to lift up fallen trees, walls and mounds of jumbled debris to see what was underneath.
For hours, searchers did not find anything. But given the thoroughness of the devastation, it seemed inevitable that the team would find at least one body. And indeed, at around 5:30 p.m., in another part of Alberta, they did.
Campbell Robertson reported from Tuscaloosa, and Kim Severson from Atlanta. Kevin Sack and Robbie Brown contributed reporting from Tuscaloosa.
