PRESIDENT George Bush yesterday offered his condolences to the victims of violent storms that swept across the southern United States as the death toll rose to at least 20.

Mr Bush was due to visit the affected areas today and said he would do his “very best” to comfort people whose lives had been “turned upside down by the tornadoes”.

A hospital in Georgia and a secondary school in Alabama - where pupils were trying to shelter - were torn apart by ferocious winds.

The death toll could increase, with the US coastguard warning that six people were still missing after their 23ft vessel began taking on water off South Carolina on Thursday night.

The tornadoes, which levelled scores of homes while flipping cars into the air and leaving thousands stranded without power, killed nine people in Georgia and 10 people in two southern Alabama towns. They were also blamed for the death of a young girl in a mobile home in Missouri.

The height of the tornado season in the US does not begin until May, but winter tornadoes are common in years which experience the El Nino phenomenon - the warming of Pacific waters brings torrential rain to some parts of the globe and drought to others.

Mr Bush said he would visit the stricken areas “with a heavy heart.”

“I go down knowing full well that I’ll be seeing people whose lives were turned upside down by the tornadoes. I’ll do my very best to comfort them,” he said.

The Bush administration’s initial response to Hurricane Katrina, the most destructive natural disaster in US history, was widely seen as a failure and it has been keen to play a more active role in natural disasters since then.

In Georgia, two died in the town of Americus when the Sumter Regional Hospital was hit by a tornado, and six died, including two children, in hard-hit Baker County. The ninth fatality was in Taylor County, to the north of Americus. “I was shocked. It was worse than I had feared,” Sonny Perdue, Georgia’s governor, said after he had toured areas hit by the storms. “It’s just a blessing that we didn’t have more fatalities.”

Tara Emnett, an official at the mayor’s office in Enterprise, Alabama, said all but one of the nine victims there were pupils at the high school, a shredded building left surrounded by broken trees and overturned cars.

The high school’s pupils had been assembled in hallways when the storm hit, in line with emergency procedures as this is generally the most structurally sound part of the building.

However the children said the hallway’s roof caved in soon after they gathered there.

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