At least 26 deaths from tornadoes killed in the Southeast, and more than a dozen injured in the Midwest by a large storm on Friday night
At least 26 people were killed in the Southeast by a storm last week, and more than a dozen others were injured in the Midwest.
A storm Friday night caused significant damage to homes and a volunteer fire department in Sullivan, a 95-mile drive southwest of Indianapolis. Matt Ames said.
In Arkansas, there were at least a dozen tornadoes. Twisters in that state left homes nearly leveled, and roads were covered with what once was the roofs and walls of buildings.
Preliminary information shows at least 22 tornadoes were reported in Illinois, eight in Iowa, four in Tennessee, five in Wisconsin and a couple in Mississippi.
William Williams, who told CNN affiliate KATV he’s an employee at a Kroger supermarket in Little Rock, said he’s “thankful to be alive” after a tornado rolled near the area while he was working Friday afternoon. He’d taken shelter inside the store, and went outside afterward to see people injured, including a woman he said had a severe leg injury.
Vehicles flying across the air, structures being flattened is unbelievable, according to the mayor. If so many people were not at their homes, it would have been a massacre.
About 100 miles east of Little Rock, the city of Wynne was “basically cut in half by damage from east to west,” Mayor Jennifer Hobbs told CNN Friday evening.
At least one person was killed in a collapsed roof of the Belvidere Apollo Theater on Friday night: Northern Illinois tornadoes, severe thunderstorms and large hail
A person is dead and many other are injured after the roof of the Apollo Theatre in Belvidere collapsed on Friday night. The collapse came as a line of storms packing 50 mph winds and dumping hail moved through the area, according to officials and the National Weather Service. The theater’s roof didn’t fall completely, but it might have been because of the storm.
There is a chance of tornadoes on Saturday in southeastern Indiana, western Ohio and northern Kentucky. The area, which includes the cities of Dayton and Cincinnati, was under a tornado watch that warned of wind gusts up to 70 mph along with large hail.
On Friday large hail wreaked havoc in northern Illinois, causing damage to cars and damaging vehicles, according to a post from the Fulton County Emergency Services and Disaster Agency.
Several businesses were “basically destroyed” and up to 40 homes were damaged by the storm which hit Sherman, less than 10 miles north of Springfield.
There were hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses without power across the South and Northeast, including in Pennsylvania and Ohio.
In Arkansas, multiple tornadoes tore through the state, along with severe thunderstorms and golf ball-size hail. Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders declared a state of emergency and activated 100 members of the state’s National Guard in response to the deadly weather.
Adamsville Police Department said on social media that damage and loss to the community last night was “catastrophic.”
The local police department said that the city was “impassable” after a tornado. According to police, the homes were damaged, the power lines were down and search and rescue teams were sent to the scene.
Two dozen people were hospitalized in Little Rock, and at least one person was killed. Homes, apartment complexes and storefronts were severely damaged, according to the Little Rock Police Department.
About 260 people were at the venue to attend a heavy metal concert and calls about a collapse began to come in at 7:48 p.m. local time, Belvidere Fire Chief Shawn Schadle told the AP.
The Destruction of Pontotoc County, Mississippi, After Storms Hit McNairy County, Arkansas, and the Tennessee Department of Emergency Management
The Sullivan County Sheriff’s Office said their worst fears became reality when they learned that members of the community had died.
At least one person has died and four others were injured in Pontotoc County in northern Mississippi due to severe weather, according to the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency.
The communities that were ravaged by ferocious storms and tornadoes in the South and Midwest are picking up the debris and digging through the rubble.
In Tennessee, at least seven people are dead after a couple of storms hit in the evening.
“We had deaths on the west side of the county and all the way to the east side of the county,” McNairy County Sheriff Guy Buck told CNN, describing a powerful storm cutting through the entire county.
The dead also included at least nine in one Tennessee county; four in the small town of Wynne, Arkansas; three in Sullivan, Indiana; and four in Illinois.
In addition to leaving trails of destruction across several states, storms have also knocked out power to battered communities, including over 30,000 customers affected by outages in Arkansas, according to poweroutage.us.
I can’t put it into words. It was devastating. It’s much different seeing it firsthand than it is when you see it on TV hit another communities,” Hobbs said.
The interiors of some homes were covered in debris, while others had their roofs ripped off, with drone footage showing the extent of the damage.
“We made her and the kids get into the bathtub because that’s supposed to be the safest place. And we just all hunkered down because all the doors blew out. There are double doors in the front and back. It all blew out at once,” Pieterick said.
The State of the Art: A Demonstration of Emergency Relief in the Midwest after a Superstorm and a Presidential Visit to Arkansas
“Had they not, looking at the devastation that we had, our death toll could have been in the hundreds,” Buck said. “The power of mother nature is something not to be underestimated,” he added.
The roof at a packed concert venue in Illinois collapsed on Saturday due to storms that ripped through the capital city of Arkansas.
The White House announced Sunday that it would provide federal resources, including financial assistance, to support recovery efforts after President Joe Biden issued a major disaster declaration.
The president’s home states of New Jersey and Delaware were being investigated by the NWS after reports of tornadoes touching down. Numerous homes were damaged and roadways shut down in southern Delaware, authorities said.
One person was found dead inside a house heavily damaged by the storm Saturday night in Bridgeville, Sussex County, Delaware State Police reported. However, the exact cause of death was not immediately known.
Debris lay scattered inside the shells of homes and on lawns: clothing, insulation, toys, splintered furniture, a pickup truck with its windows shattered.
Ashley Macmillan said she, her husband and their children huddled with their dogs in a small bathroom as a tornado passed, “praying and saying goodbye to each other, because we thought we were dead.” Their home was damaged, but they were not hurt.
Gov. Bill Lee drove to the county Saturday to tour the destruction and comfort residents. He said the storm was the worst week of his time in office, coming weeks after a school shooting in Nashville killed six people including a family friend who attended his funeral.
“It’s terrible what has happened in this community, this county, this state,” Lee said. “But it looks like your community has done what Tennessean communities do and that is rally and respond.”
Jeffrey Day’s daughter called him after she saw that Adamsville was being hit. As the storm passed, she hid in a closet with her two kids and answered the phone screaming.
After the storm passed, his daughter crawled out of her destroyed home and over barbed wire and drove to nearby family. On Saturday evening, baby clothes were still strewn about the site.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/04/02/1167650510/tornado-damage-south-midwest
The Avatar of the Apollo: Tornado Damage in the Midwest Crawford County Associated with a Concertgoer’s ‘Nightclub’
“I sat with him and I held his hand and I was (telling him), ‘It’s going to be OK.’ I didn’t really know much else what to do,” concertgoer Gabrielle Lewellyn told WTVO-TV.
The Apollo was cleaned up on Saturday with the help of forklifts. Business owners picked up shattered windows.
Three people were killed in Crawford County when a tornado hit, according to the county board chair.
“We’ve had emergency crews digging people out of their basements because the house is collapsed on top of them, but luckily they had that safe space to go to,” Rutan said at a news conference.
Sullivan Mayor Clint Lamb said at a news conference that an area south of the county seat of about 4,000 “is essentially unrecognizable right now” and several people were rescued overnight. There were reports of as many as 12 people injured, he said.
The National Weather Service said the tornado had a path of at least 25 miles and had a wind speed of up to 165 mph.
Masoud Shahed-Ghaznavi was lunching at home when it roared through his neighborhood, causing him to hide in the laundry room as sheetrock fell and windows shattered. When he emerged, the house was mostly rubble.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/04/02/1167650510/tornado-damage-south-midwest
More than 40 tornadoes and tree damage reported in Pontotoc County, Mississippi, and a woman killed by a possible tornado in Alabama
In Pontotoc County, Mississippi, authorities confirmed one death and four injuries, after another suspected tornado killed a woman in northern Alabama.
Bill Bunting, the chief of forecast operations at the Storm Prediction Center, told Associated Press that it could take days to determine the number of tornadoes. There were also hundreds of reports of large hail and damaging winds, he said.
Authorities in Oklahoma have reported nearly 100 fires due to the storm system. More than 40 homes were destroyed and at least 32 people were injured.
On Saturday there was heavy tree damage in NJ, and Eric Hoeflich told NJ.com that there may have been another tornado in the area.