Twenty-eight people were killed in Tennessee, 13 in Arkansas, seven in Kentucky and four in Alabama, officials in those states said.

Hundreds of people were injured in the four states, plus Mississippi, as the tornadoes Tuesday and early Wednesday collapsed homes and buildings and sent cars, trees and debris whipping through the air.

"I've seen tornadoes on the ground and I've seen them in the air, but this was different. This one was wide, a massive funnel," Jean Byrd of Mason, Tennessee, a town of just over 1,000 residents, told AFP.

With a sigh of relief, Byrd added: "It touched down just after it passed our house. We were lucky."

It took only two minutes for one twister to turn a commercial center southeast of Memphis into a horrific wreck and leave behind three dead.

It looked like a bomb hit the main building: the front was torn away and the roof collapsed, with glass and tiles spilled across the ground.

"It swept through in a matter of one and a half, two minutes. Boom, boom, over," said Memphis police officer Roderic Cunningham, who said looters had quickly followed the storm's destruction.

The worst barrage of tornadoes in recent memory in the region left up to 35,000 people around Memphis powerless early Wednesday and facing up to a week for power to be restored.

Rescue teams were going from door to door across the countryside to check for injured and survivors, as thousands of people picked through the debris of flattened homes, hoping to recover some valuables and mementos.

President George W. Bush offered prayers and disaster relief for the victims.

"Prayers can help, and so can the government," Bush said. "I do want the people in those states that the American people are standing with them."

In northern Alabama, where a mother, father and their teenage son died together in Lawrence county, elderly Gibbson Hill resident Mary Files said she was sound asleep when the storm hit, tearing out the walls and roof of her home.

"It woke me up when the stuff in the house went to falling in. I got my daughter up and we went to the end of the hall by the heater and that's where we stayed."

In Tennessee, 149 people were injured, said Julie Oaks of the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency.

"That'll probably be going up throughout the day. We have widespread damage across the state," she said.

Students at Union University in Jackson, Tennessee, heroically rescued classmates trapped in the dead of night after two campus dormitories collapsed, university president David Dockery said.

Fifty-one students were treated in hospital, including some with extensive injuries. But no one was killed, even though 1,200 students were on campus at the time.

"It's an amazing thing," Dockery told reporters.

The campus has already been rebuilt once after a 2002 tornado caused 2.6 million dollars in damage. Now, "we are estimating that the damage is at least 15 times what that was at that time," he said.

In neighboring Kentucky, three people were killed in a trailer park in Muhlenberg County, and four others died in Allen County, Buddy Rogers of the Kentucky Division of Emergency Management told AFP.

In Arkansas at least 13 people were killed by tornadoes that tore through the state, injuring dozens and destroying houses and businesses in a number of towns.

Downed power lines, trees across roads and power outages hampered the night-long rescue effort as teams searched house by house for trapped people.

The hardest hit appeared to be the town of Atkins in Pope County, where an 11-year-old girl and her parents were killed. In Clinton, a town in Van Buren County, two people were killed and at least 50 were injured.

The same turbulent weather front could delay Thursday's planned launch of space shuttle Atlantis from Florida's east coast.

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