ADEL — Val Del Road was an eerie place Monday morning.

Light rain fell from gloomy skies as people quietly picked through massive piles of rubble left in the wake of a tornado that ravaged the area early Sunday morning. 

Whole forests of trees lay snapped in half like toothpicks. Sheets of metal roofing were twisted and crumpled like tin foil. Houses lay obliterated, transformed from four walls and a roof into a sprawling mess of wood, brick, glass and memories.

Jeff and Carla Bullard’s house suffered one of the hardest hits, leaving their home of 10 years in ruins.

The rubble was a surreal scene of wreckage. Shelves full of books, frames and vases stood exposed to the cloudy sky. A piano lay overturned in the yard. Cars were smashed in with bricks and wood. A small, red toy car sat in the middle of a junkyard that used to be a home.

Carla said they never saw it coming.

“We didn’t get a warning. We knew nothing,” she said.

They, along with their 19-year-old daughter, Jenny, were asleep in the home when the tornado came plowing straight toward them.

“Hail started coming through our master bedroom window, and my husband heard it and he woke me up and we both got out of the bed,” Carla said. “We started out of our bedroom, and he stopped me and said, ‘stay here.’ Our daughter was hollering for her daddy.”

As soon as Jeff went to get his daughter from her bedroom at the opposite end of the home, the “whole middle of the house just broke,” Carla said.

Jenny heard her father yelling for her, but couldn’t find him. After fighting free from some debris, she went searching, but found herself wandering out of the house without knowing because the house didn’t even exist anymore, she said.

“I was kind of in the yard, but on top of the refrigerator and the stove and everything. I had to get back to where the house used to be,” Jenny said.

She found her dad under pieces of their home. Jenny suffered some scrapes and serious bruising. Jeff broke his arm.

Jenny and Carla said they aren’t sure if the tornado stayed for just 20 seconds or a full minute, but that short time is all it took for their home to turn to rubble.

“It left as quick as it came,” Carla said.

With only the light from their phones guiding them, the Bullards stumbled across the road in the dark to the house of Jeff’s parents. That home was spared by the storm, although it is now surrounded by large trees uprooted by the storm.

Jeff and Carla’s son, Jerred, lives next to them with his wife and two children. Though not in the direct path of the tornado, his home was also ruined, Carla said.

“(We’re) numb, shocked,” Carla said. “Just pray for us, that we’ll recover from it. It was the worst thing we’ve ever lived through. It was awful.”

The storm cell that spawned the destructive tornado wreaked havoc and grief all across Georgia Sunday. At least 14 people were killed, including seven in Cook County.

Gov. Nathan Deal has declared a state of emergency for 16 counties in the aftermath of the deadly storm.

Not far from the Bullards’ home, John Henry Surrency, 58, picked through another pile of rubble, the remains of the home where he was raised.

No one was living in the home when the tornado destroyed it. It had belonged to Surrency’s mom and stepdad, Jack and Judy Warren. Judy passed away about 12 years ago, and Jack died of a heart attack only two months ago.

“I grew up right here,” Surrency said, gesturing to a corner of the home that was now nothing more than a piece of wood on top of the foundation.

Surrency said the house was built about 100 years ago out of the pine trees that grew on the family farm. On Monday morning, Surrency and others were digging through the rubble trying to find things to keep.

“The old house looks like it shifted about a foot before she gave up. It’s got a lot of memories in it. We’re going to try to salvage what we can out of it and then see what goes from there,” Surrency said, clutching a large, ornate golden key.

The key hung in the house for as long as Surrency can remember, a memento that marked his mom and dad’s 25th wedding anniversary.

“This is a pretty place, full of pretty pine trees, and right now it looks bad, don’t it? This place looks like a war zone,” Surrency said. “I’ve lived here all my life, and you never think about this stuff in South Georgia.”

Surrency was awake when the tornado ripped through, and he got a small warning from the weather alerts. He and his family live down from the old family home that was destroyed. As they herded into the bathroom, the front window burst.

Surrency heard the sound of a train, the whole house vibrated, and within seconds it was all over. He said his stepdad wouldn’t have stood a chance of surviving the storm.

“If he hadn’t died in November, unless the Lord had protected him, he would’ve probably died,” Surrency said.

Surrency’s house was fine, apart from minor damage. His brother, Gary, lives on the other side of the family home, and his home was completely destroyed from the back, Surrency said.

Despite losing his childhood home in a matter of seconds, Surrency is optimistic moving forward.

“We worked to get it, we can work to fix it, we can keep on going,” he said. “We go back to the old American way. You pull up your bootstraps and you go on.

“There are people today who are sad because they lost family. We ain’t like that. We lost some memories (but) we can get some more. The Lord blessed us through it.”

Not far from the Val Del carnage, the Sunshine Acres trailer park was also ravaged by the tornado, leaving the community to face death and devastating destruction in its wake.

Devocheo Williams, 29, is from Virginia, but was visiting family in Sunshine Acres when the storm hit.

He thought it was just a normal thunderstorm, but about 3 a.m., he heard screaming. The front window busted, the whole house started shaking, and “within 15 seconds, everything was demolished,” Williams said.

Williams is now staying at the Red Cross shelter at First Baptist Church in Adel. He and his family are all OK, he said.

But what he saw and experienced has left him “devastated,” a feeling he shares with many across South Georgia as survivors begin to pick up the pieces of their homes and their lives that the storm ripped apart.