EVANSVILLE, Ind. (AP) — Barbara Bullock stood in her tattered yard, where piles of her belongings were strewn along with the remains of her house after a deadly tornado struck while she and her husband slept.

“Believe it or not, I just praise God for being alive,” Bullock, 52, said Monday. “Everything else can be replaced.”

The twister, which slashed through Indiana and Kentucky early Sunday with winds estimated at more than 200 mph, killed at least 22 people.

Afterward, Bullock placed a wooden pumpkin with the words “We give thanks to God” in the blown-out window of her home in Newburgh.

A few miles to the west in Evansville, crews were draining a pond near the Eastbrook Mobile Home Park, which was obliterated in the storm. Indiana officials said emergency sirens sounded twice, but many in the mobile home park said they did not hear them.

Four bodies were found in the pond Sunday, and another was found Monday. Authorities expected to finish draining the pond by this morning.

“It is the one spot in this area that we have not thoroughly searched because it is under water,” said Eric Williams, Vanderburgh County chief deputy sheriff.

The tornado cut a path of devastation at least 20 miles long and about a quarter-mile wide. At least 18 people died at the mobile home park, and four others were killed in neighboring Warrick County. Dozens remained hospitalized.

All 200 people on a list of those feared missing from the mobile home park had been accounted for by Monday night, said Sheriff Brad Ellsworth.

Experts say the tornado was unusually intense and fast. Pushed by a rapid shift in the jet stream, the twister raced along at 70 to 75 mph and stayed on the ground for about 35 minutes, said David Blanchard, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Paducah, Ky.

“It was just booking along during the greatest punch of the jet stream. You just don’t see speeds like that very often,” Blanchard said.

Dan McCarthy, the warning coordinator at the federal government’s Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Okla., said most people wrongly think of tornadoes as a spring event.

He said the nation experiences a “second season” of tornadoes from mid-October through November, when weather conditions resemble those in the spring.

“That’s what makes tornadoes so dangerous this time of the year — people just don’t expect them,” he said.

“They expect them to happen in the spring and in the afternoon or evening, not at 2 in the morning in November.”

Meanwhile, hundreds of survivors were wondering how they would recover without the homes they had made amid the Ohio River bottomlands.

State officials said nearly 600 homes were destroyed or sustained major damage. Gov. Mitch Daniels declared a state of emergency for the area as he asked the federal government for disaster assistance.

The Federal Emergency Management agency has sent teams to the area, said FEMA spokeswoman Nicol Andrews.

“This could be any community,” said Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh, who toured the area Monday. “This could be any of us.”

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Associated Press writer Chris Havlik contributed to this report.