The Tennessean from Nashville, Tennessee • Page 6

6A Frfctoy, FbniTy 17 199S THE TENNESSEAN TENNESSEE JL4 aby found unharmed in wake of tornado joppa Tornado strikes trailer park. Huntsville i 1: i Birmingham r- xMortgomeny ALABAMA I TT FLORIDA 100mile9 VS' The last deadly funnel cloud that struck Alabama hit on Palm Sunday a year ago, killing 22 people, most in a church about 60 miles from Arab. When the Huntsville weather service office went down, Birmingham took over watching the radar and the weather service said there was no delay in picking up the tornado and Issuing a warning. Police got the warning through deputies in a nearby county and were in the process of sending out siren vehicles to alert residents when the tornado hit, LL Danny Harvell said. In Washington, Sea Howell He-flin, called for a complete accounting from the weather To the west in Mississippi, thunderstorms plaguing the waterlogged north rumbled south and much of the state remained under a flash flood watch.

Northwest in Oklahoma, it was freezing rain that was causing problems. Three people died in traffic accidents blamed on ice, and police reported more than 200 crashes. Arab (pronounced AY-rab) is 30 miles south of Huntsville and has a population of about 6,300. The town's three dead were a girl and two men, all killed in separate locations, Marshall County Coroner Dempsey Hibbs said. Hospital officials said 66 people were treated yesterday morning, with 13 admitted and four transferred to Huntsville for additional care, and that they knew of 40 other people treated at two other hospitals.

The tornado apparently hit a subdivision in the rural community of Joppa, where about a dozen injuries were reported, and then moved on to Arab, some three miles east The tornado lifted Ricky and Dianne Fortenberry's wooden A-frame house from its cement foundation, carried it about 40 feet and dropped it on a trailer while the couple clung to their bed. Like the baby, the Fortenberrys escaped serious harm. "They had to dig us out," she said, standing atop the splintered rubble that had been her home and pointing to the mattress where she and her husband had been sleeping ARAB, Ala. (AP) A tornado ripped across northern Alabama before dawn yesterday, killing at least three people and injuring more than 100. Teams looking for more victims in the rubble found a baby unharmed beneath two wrecked trailers.

The dead Included a 4-year-old girl, the coroner said. About an hour before the tornado hit, lightning struck the office of the National Weather Service in Hunts-ville. The service's Birmingham office was able to issue a warning at 5 a.rru minutes before the twister raced through Arab, but police didn't have time to warn everyone. "Normally they give us a siren warning, but they didn't this morn ing," Arab resident Karen Berry said. "There was nothing." There was just the howl of the wind in the dark sending debris 'smashing through windows, tearing off roofs, pulling trees from the soil and demolishing trailers, homes and lives.

In the aftermath, rescue crews searched for people possibly trapped in the wreckage, rain pounded flattened barns, pink insulation dripped from trees and yet more wind shook cars creeping over littered roads. No more victims were found just one small miracle. "We found a 1-year-old baby under two trailers," fireman Robert Reynolds said. "He was sitting there, not making a sound." 100 km AP when the storm woke them. As she spoke, a little neighbor girl sat in a car nearby and cried.

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Buchanan formed a presidential exploratory committee to test his fund-raising abilities. Advisers said they expected a formal declaration of candidacy in the spring. NAACP hit with suits NEW YORK A member of the NAACP's board of directors filed suit yesterday seeking to force Chairman William Gibson to release an audit of his expenses before this weekend's board elections. The suit, filed by Hazel Dukes In state Supreme Court in Manhattan, asks for an injunction directing that tomorrow's election be postponed until the board can learn results of an audit of Gibson's expenses from 1989 until last year. A hearing was scheduled for today.

Gibson has been accused of double-dipping on his NAACP expense account, taking hundreds of thousands of dollars for personal use. Drug may build bone SAN FRANCISCO A drug that could become one of the first new treatments for osteoporosis in more than a decade built bone in women with the disease, a study released today said. The drug alendronate was given to 516 women over three years, producing an average 6.8 increase in bone density at the spine, said Merck which plans next month to submit it for Food and Drug Administration approval. Patients in the trials in 15 countries outside the United States also showed 4.8 and 6.9 increases at the two spots on the hip most prone to fracture. If the drug works, it's good news for the 25 million Americans, many of them women, suffering from the brittle bone disease.

It's even better news that other potential therapies are in the pipeline. "In the next three to five years we should be seeing several new drugs," Dr. Ethel Siris, a Columbia University professor and an adviser to the FDA. Senate abolishes slavery JACKSON, Miss. It only took 130 years, but the Mississippi Senate finally voted to abolish slavery.

The House will vote next on the amendment, which senators unanimously approved yesterday. Mississippi is the only state never to ratify the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution outlawing slavery. The state held out when the slavery amendment was adopted in 1865, in part because lawmakers were angry they had not been reimbursed for freed slaves. Three die in plane crash KANSAS CITY, Mo.

A stretch DC-8 cargo plane crashed last night after its tail scraped the runway on takeoff, killing all three people aboard, authorities said. The plane, owned by Air Transport International, crashed about 8:30 p.m. near a runway at Kansas City International Airport, said a spokesman for the dry's Aviation Department The plane, headed for Westover Air Force Base just outside Chico-pee, had aborted its first takeoff attempt, said a spokeswoman for the Federal Aviation Administration. She did not know why. A ball of flame shot from an engine and the plane virtually stood on its tail before disappearing in flames down an embankment beside the runway, said witness DelberSmeltzer.

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