Larry W. Smith/European Pressphoto Agency
Police officers helped people in a trailer park in Wichita, Kan.,
after a tornado swept through the area on Saturday night.
By MANNY FERNANDEZ and MATT FLEGENHEIMER
TULSA, Okla. — A series of powerful thunderstorms spawned high winds
and dozens of reported tornadoes across parts of Oklahoma, Kansas,
Nebraska and Iowa on Saturday evening and early Sunday morning,
destroying scores of houses in one small town in Iowa and killing five
people in one Oklahoma city, the authorities said.
A man listened for the sound of trapped people in a mobile home park
in Wichita.
Enlarge This Image
Eric Francis/Getty Images
About 75 percent of Thurman, Iowa, was destroyed by a tornado on
Saturday, officials said.
Most of the reported tornadoes were either short-lived or struck
largely rural areas, causing only minor damage, but there were a few
exceptions.
Shortly after midnight Sunday morning, a large tornado hit Woodward, a
city of 12,000 northwest of Oklahoma City, wrecking homes and
businesses and killing five people, state emergency management
officials said. "We're hearing of what sounds to be significant damage
in the area," said Keli Cain, a spokeswoman for the Oklahoma
Department of Emergency Management. "We have injuries and quite a bit
of damage to homes and buildings."
The tornado on Sunday morning swept through the western section of the
city. In a video from The Woodward News that was posted on the Web
site of The Oklahoman newspaper, a massive tornado can be seen
whipping up debris in the brief moments when flashes of lightning
brighten the dark sky. Ms. Cain said officials did not yet have any
details about the five fatalities, but The Woodward News reported that
two of those killed were children.In Iowa on Saturday night, a tornado
battered the small Iowa town of Thurman damaging or destroying 75 to
90 percent of its homes, the authorities said. The town, with a
population of roughly 250 is south of Omaha, was on lockdown as
officials prepared to assess the damage.
"There's not a whole lot of buildings in town that don't have some
sort of damage," Mike Crecelius, the emergency management director for
Thurman's Fremont County, said in an interview Sunday morning.
Mr. Crecelius said there were some residents with minors cuts and
bruises, but no reports of any serious injuries or fatalities. "Mostly
everybody was able to get to cover before it hit," he said.
Nearby, five tractor-trailers that had been traveling on Interstate 29
shortly before the tornado hit Thurman were overturned in the high
winds. One truck driver was seriously injured and transported to a
hospital with a perforated lung, he said.
Also in Iowa, a possible tornado struck the Greater Regional Medical
Center in Creston, a town of 7,800 about 75 miles outside Des Moines.
The hospital sustained roof damage, but no injuries were reported and
patients were being moved to a hospital about 30 miles away. The
town's mayor, Warren Woods, told The Weather Channel that about half
the city was without power, and there were numerous trees and power
lines down.
Gov. Sam Brownback of Kansas issued a disaster emergency declaration
on Sunday after severe thunderstorms and tornadoes that caused power
outages, destroyed homes and damaged hangars at McConnell Air Force
Base in Wichita.
"We are continuing to assess all the damages across the state," he
said in a statement, "and signing this declaration clears the way for
making state aid available to those counties that need help with
clean-up and recovery."
Mr. Brownback told CNN that 97 tornadoes were reported across Kansas.
But, "God was merciful," he said, and no deaths had been reported,
which he credited to the early warning given by forecasters.
"People took it very seriously, acted and prepared," Mr. Brownback said.
In southeast Nebraska, The Associated Press reported that an apparent
tornado in took down barns, large trees and some small rural
structures. The Johnson County emergency director, Clint Strayhorn,
said he was trying to determine the twister's duration and the damage
it caused. Baseball-sized hail was reported in Petersburg, about 140
miles northwest of Omaha,
On Friday, forecasters with the National Weather Service had predicted
a tornado outbreak that had the potential of being a "high-end,
life-threatening event," issuing a rare high-risk warning for parts of
Oklahoma and Nebraska. The warning, made more than 24 hours in advance
of the storms, set the stage for a tense weekend across much of the
Central Plains, as local emergency officials, residents and
forecasters monitored a series of storms that appeared to gain
strength on Saturday as evening approached.
Russell Schneider, the director of the National Weather Service's
Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Okla., said Saturday there was a
"strong potential for damaging, long-track tornadoes" across large
swaths of Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma, including the metropolitan
areas of Omaha, Wichita, and Oklahoma City.
At its most damaging, authorities were bracing for winds up to 70
miles per hour in some areas, Mr. Schneider said, with the chance of
hail the size of "a golf ball, even tennis baseball, maybe even
baseballs."
The storms were expected to shift eastward on Sunday, moving toward
Wisconsin, Illinois and Missouri.
The high-risk warning forecast, issued by the Storm Prediction Center,
came after a recent announcement from the weather service that
increasingly ominous terms, like "mass devastation" or "catastrophic,"
would be tested in warnings issued across areas of Kansas and
Missouri.
The goal, said Mike Hudson, a National Weather Service meteorologist
in Kansas City, is to increase the likelihood that residents will heed
the agency's warnings during the most extreme weather events. "When we
have a day like today, with a very significant risk for very
significant weather, those are the days we want to be calling out the
level of risk in our warnings," he said. "This will be the first
opportunity."
Manny Fernandez reported from Tulsa, Okla., and Matt Flegenheimer from
New York.
More:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/16/us/violent-storms-cut-across-the-central-plains.html?_r=1&google_editors_picks=true
--
Together, we can change the world, one mind at a time.
Have a great day,
Tommy
--
Together, we can change the world, one mind at a time.
Have a great day,
Tommy
--
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