HENRYVILLE (Indiana): Rescue teams and residents combed through storm-wrecked towns to assess damage on Saturday from a chain of tornadoes that cut a 1,000-mile swath of destruction from the Midwest to the Gulf of Mexico, as the death toll crept up to at least 37 people, reported Reuters.

The twisters spawned by massive thunderstorms splintered blocks of homes, damaged schools and a prison, and tossed around vehicles like toys, killing 18 people in Kentucky, 14 in neighboring Indiana, three in Ohio and one in Alabama, officials said. Georgia also reported a storm-related death.

"We're not unfamiliar with Mother Nature's wrath out here in Indiana," Governor Mitch Daniels told CNN during a visit to the stricken southeast corner of the state.

"But this is about as serious as we've seen in the years since I've been in this job," he said, standing against the backdrop of the hard hit town of Henryville.

Friday's storms, spanning 1,000 miles from the Gulf of Mexico to near the Great Lakes, came on top of severe weather earlier in the week in the Midwest and brought the overall death toll to 49.

The report said tornadoes smashed Indiana and Kentucky terribly hard, with Alabama, Georgia, Ohio and Tennessee overrun as well.

President Barack Obama called the governors of Indiana, Kentucky and Ohio to offer condolences and assure them that the federal government was ready to help if needed, the White House said.

Television footage from some of the worst-hit towns in Indiana and Kentucky showed houses lifted from their foundations, trees downed and stripped of their foliage, and rubble scattered across wide swathes of land.

Friday's band of tornadoes, with at least several dozen sightings and touchdowns, has already been compared to the "Super Outbreak" of twisters of April 1974, one of the largest and most violent in the United States.

Friday's storms came less than a year after a series of tornadoes caused some of the worst insured losses in US history, and the insurance industry is likely facing substantial costs again.

Aerial TV footage showed battered homes across several states, including Georgia, where light planes were lifted off the tarmac of a regional airport in Paulding County before smashing back to the ground.

An Indiana official confirmed 14 deaths from the tornadoes on Friday, in four southeastern counties. A spokeswoman for the Kentucky governor reported a statewide death toll of 18, while Ohio officials said there were three deaths in a single county.

Storm warnings had been issued throughout the day Friday, from the Midwest to the Southeast, and schools and businesses were closed ahead of the storms after a series of tornadoes earlier in the week killed 13 people in Kansas, Missouri, Illinois and Tennessee.

This week's violent storms raised fears that 2012 will be another bad year for tornadoes after 550 deaths in the United States were blamed on twisters last year, the deadliest year in nearly a century, according to the National Weather Service.

The highest death tolls were from an outbreak last April in Alabama and Mississippi that claimed 364 lives, and from a May tornado in Joplin, Missouri, that killed 161 people.