Forecasters advised people in the storm-threatened areas to prepare. Tornadoes tore up roofs, uprooted trees and tossed vehicles.
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As night fell Tuesday, there were tornado warnings in Oklahoma and Texas while states like Kansas and Kentucky were getting blasted by thunderstorms, radar showed.
And Indiana suffered two tornadoes, the National Weather Service said: one west of Bloomington and the other in Vanderburgh County in the south. No injuries were reported.
A trained spotter reported a tornado near the airport moving toward the town at 5:43 p.m.
It also confirmed two more relatively weak tornadoes within 30 miles of Oklahoma City: an EF1 tornado near Luther and an EF0 tornado near Mustang.
Amateur photographer Jason Tuggle shared his view of the storm rolling in to Olivette, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, on Tuesday. And while there was plenty of shear in the middle levels of the atmosphere Tuesday, it became apparent by late in the afternoon and evening that the shear in the lowest few thousand feet of the atmosphere was not enabling that spin to translate to the ground to form numerous tornadoes. You’ll need to stay “weather aware” the next several days.
Administrators for Oklahoma City Public Schools, the state’s largest school district, planned to meet early Tuesday morning to assess the weather and determine whether to cancel classes, spokesman Mark Myers said in an emailed statement.
Agency spokeswoman Keli Pirtle says it’s unclear when survey teams will release those results.
“We heard the hail coming down and it was scary”, Alexander Ramirez-Medrano said.
And a 62-year-old woman died when a tree fell on her mobile home in Tomball, Texas, Harris County sheriff’s spokesman Deputy Thomas Gilliland said.
The main threat continues to be strong damaging wind gusts and large hail.
“It didn’t do too much damage to the actual house, it just took down the electrical stuff”, Gabriel Hill said.
The Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma, says an area stretching from New Orleans to central IL could see scattered storms with strong winds and hail on Wednesday.
A severe thunderstorm watch has been issued for Hancock and Pearl River counties until 3 p.m., part of the same springtime storm system causing damage across the Southeast.
Schools in Oklahoma City and several of its suburbs planned to close early on Tuesday, ahead of the severe weather expected to come in the afternoon.
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LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) Springtime storms lashed parts of the Midwest and South on Wednesday, but on a smaller scale than the night before when tornadoes in Oklahoma and Texas injured more than a dozen people and damaged homes.
