E-mail updates
Follow on Twitter
Subscribe to RSSThe National Weather Service warns that fast-moving, life-threatening tornadoes will potentially touch down after dark. The Weather Channel's Jim Cantore, Mike Seidel and Eric Fisher report.
Updated at 7:06 a.m. Sunday ET: At least five people have been killed in Oklahoma and a disaster emergency has been declared in Kansas after a severe storm system moving through the Midwest spawned a number of strong tornadoes.
Oklahoma Dept. of Emergency Management information officer Keli Cain confirmed there were five deaths in the Woodward area of north-west Oklahoma.
At least 29 people were injured across Oklahoma and neighbouring states.
Two of the dead are children, according to NBC News affiliate in Oklahoma, KFOR.
In Kansas, governor Sam Brownback issued a declaration of disaster emergency to help speed relief to areas affected by the storms. "We are continuing to assess all the damages across the state," said Brownback, "and signing this declaration clears the way for making state aid available to those counties that need help with clean-up and recovery."
Dozens of tornadoes were reported Saturday as baseball-size hail shattered windows and tore the siding off homes in northeast Nebraska and one twister damaged a hospital in Creston, Iowa. Several homes were wrecked in Kansas.
NBC News reported there were 112 recorded tornadoes in Kansas, Nebraska, Indiana and Oklahoma.
Forecasters had warned of "life-threatening" storms in the nation's midsection. No serious injuries from Saturday were immediately reported.
A tornado was reported on the ground near Wichita, Kan., late Saturday and power in the city was going out, NBC station KSN reported. Homes were reported damaged on the city's south side, but details were not immediately available.
Slideshow: Tornadoes rake Midwest
KSN also reported that one building at airplane-maker Spirit Aerosystem collapsed in the storm. At the Wichita airport, winds gusting to 84 mph blew open hangars and overturned luggage carts, The Weather Channel reported. McConnell Air Force Base, which relocated aircraft to other bases before the storms moved in, reported hangar and housing damage, KSN said.
The National Weather Service office in Wichita temporarily turned over operations to the Topeka office Saturday as storms threatened to destroy its building.
A tornado was spotted in Langley, Kan., earlier Saturday evening.
Orlin Wagner / AP
A tornado moves on the ground north of Soloman, Kan., Saturday, April 14, 2012. (AP Photo/Orlin Wagner)
One tornado narrowly missing Salina after being on the ground for about 30 miles.
Three farmsteads sustained damage in Rush County, Kan. and a home was destroyed near Langley, NBC News reported. Trees were downed and power lines were down for other rural customers.
One tornado damaged the roof and blew out windows at the Greater Regional Medical Center in Creston, Iowa, but no injuries were reported, officials said. Power was out in much of the city of 7,600 population about 75 miles southwest of Des Moines.
Fremont County, Iowa, Emergency Management Director Mike Crecelius told The Associated Press about 75 percent of the town of Thurman was destroyed. He said there were no injuries and no deaths in the town of about 250 people. Crecelius said the town was on lockdown and some residents took refuge in City Hall, which still had power. Officials and residents expect to start cleaning up Sunday.
Stormchasers early Sunday reported major damage from a significant tornado in Woodward, Okla. Significant sructural damage and possible injuries were reported, The Weather Channel reported.
An apparent tornado took down barns, outbuildings and large trees in southeast Nebraska, and Johnson County emergency director Clint Strayhorn said he was still trying to determine how long the twister was on the ground and how much damage it did.
"I'm on a 2-mile stretch that this thing is on the ground and I haven't even gotten to the end of it yet," he said as he walked the path of destruction near the Johnson-Nemaha county line. He described a line of downed trees and a barn that was destroyed. He didn't immediately know of any injuries.
“What is now under way is potentially a very serious situation,” Bill Bunting, chief of operations for the Storm Prediction Center said earlier Saturday. Officials warned that other areas at risk were parts of Illinois, Missouri and Texas.
The last time the National Weather Service issued such a high-risk warning was last April, Bunting said.
Comments from the targeted region started to stream onto msnbc.com’s Facebook page Saturday evening. Their comments and their Facebook IDs:
"Oklahoma is get'n shaken up jus a bit. If they weren't ALL Around. I woulda left state! But gonna pray & ride it out here in Okie.” -- Kimberly Dawn.
“Partly cloudy and very windy in S.E. Kansas with potential for severe storms after 10 pm. You pray and keep your eyes on the weather reports.” -- Valori Richardson
“I'm east of Wichita, KS. Very muggy here. Very windy. Waiting for the storms to pop here. The local weather people are warning everyone to be prepared to take shelter even into the overnight hours. This is the real deal.” -- Diane Lowery.
Nebraska canceled its spring scrimmage football game as heavy rain, hail and lightning moved through the area an hour and a half before kickoff, The Associated Press reported. Records show the spring game has been played every year since at least 1950. In northeast Nebraska, baseball-sized hail rained down, Bunting said.
The Weather Channel's Dr. Greg Forbes takes a look at the night's forecast.
He advised the nearly 5 million residents who live in the high-risk area to listen to their NOAA weather radio, a nationwide network of radio stations that broadcast from the National Weather Service.
He expects fast-moving tornadoes to touch down after dark, a dangerous time as people may not be able to see the warning signs. The storm threat continues Sunday, he said, as storms move east through Texas, Arkansas and into the Great Lakes region and Wisconsin.
Local officials should notify residents via outdoor sirens, phone calls and social media, Bunting said.
Tornado sirens already sounded across Oklahoma City hours before dawn on Saturday. Department of Emergency Management official Michelann Ooten said one of the possible tornadoes was spotted near Piedmont, a small town near Oklahoma City where a twister killed several people last May.
Weather Service meteorologist Kevin Brown told The Associated Press that the storms Saturday morning were fairly weak but still damaged some homes.
A tornado that touched down Friday afternoon sent 10 people to the hospital with "bumps and bruises" and ripped through southwest Norman, ripping up telephone poles, shredding trees and ripping off rooftops, according to the Oklahoman. The AP reported that 100 people were staying at a Red Cross shelter that had been established.
The Weather Channel's Eric Fisher reports on the latest in Oklahoma City.
On Friday, Norman, Okla., home to the University of Oklahoma campus, got a preview of the potential destruction when a twister whizzed by the nation's tornado forecasting headquarters but caused little damage.
The Storm Prediction Center, which is part of the National Weather Service, gave the sobering warning that the outbreak could be a "high-end, life-threatening event."
Historic warning
Director Russ Schneider said it was just the second time in U.S. history that the center issued a high-risk warning more than 24 hours in advance. The first was in April 2006, when nearly 100 tornadoes tore across the southeastern U.S., killing a dozen people and damaging more than 1,000 homes in Tennessee.
It's possible to issue earlier warnings because improvements in storm modeling and technology are letting forecasters predict storms earlier and with greater confidence, said Chris Vaccaro, a spokesman for the National Weather Service. In the past, people often have had only minutes of warning when a siren went off.
The strongly worded message came after the National Weather Service announced last month that it would start using terms like "mass devastation," "unsurvivable" and "catastrophic" in warnings in an effort to get more people to take heed.
This article includes reporting by The Weather Channel and The Associated Press.
More content from msnbc.com and NBC News:
Leave a Comment:
Just outran the worst of the storm...I was leaving OKC when I heard that twisters where hitting in Norman. I had planned to stay a while during my stay in the City, but I have lived in this state long enough not to take those kind of chances.
I had to sleep through this storm through the wee hours of the morning. Aside from my garbage can lids and fruit trees being blown about, and a seriously soggy yard, no serious damage, thank God. Joplin and those twisters earlier this year are still fresh in a lot of minds.
I hope you and yours are all safe during this mess. I am praying for a quick end to this.
Time to fire up the Gary England Drinking game!!! If you know what that means you might just be from OK.
I live in Kansas. Thank God we have a great community out here for support.
Aw man I live in WI! If this is caused by global warming and our house gets hit, I'm going to start spitting on any Republican I see for not caring about correcting global warming!!
@Rob, I will be right behind you. These damn repuke's only care about themselves and Sotty boy's agenda rather than worry about if someone has any proper shelter from any type of severe weather,Especially Tornado's.
Didn't take long for a troll to blame it on Republicans...geez, go back to the crack pipe
Get off your crack pipe you beer guzzeling butt sniffing buffoon with illusions of godhood.
Cannot agree more. Quite an eyeopener isn't it?
Right Rob...global warming is so easily fixed.
Seriously, you two want to spit on people who disagree with you, and yet you call them the pukes and backwards ones.....Perhaps you'd also believe someone danced up these storms or conjured 'em up with voodoo. Wow, pot, pot, kettle, kettle, black, black.......According to your theory Repubs musta been around a LOOOONNNGGG time to cause the Ice Age, the end to dinosaurs, the Mayans, etc.....one word for your posts and mentality: RUBBISH!
Regarding an earlier comment about sleeping through the severe weather sirens, my understanding is that they are designed to be heard outdoors. If you want to be sure to get the warnings, you need a weather alert radio.
I live eight blocks from a weather siren yet I've never heard it inside my house. I've walked outside when I've seen warnings on TV and heard it going off, so I believe you're right. I purchased a weather radio, $30 at Walgreens. Last summer I heard what I believed to be a tornado, go past my house. It touched down in Lapel just north of Indy, yet the warning sirens couldn't be heard. It sounded just like a train coming from the south and heading straight up 465. I think a weather radio is a much better idea than depending on those sirens.
anyone notice cancelled is spelled wrong?????
Welcome.......To the "NEW SPRING"....y'all...!
Being from Norman we often take for granted that nothing will really happen here. Unfortunately Moore gets all the major damage and we rest easy. Yesterday showed us how wrong we were. I had heard of some down power lines and such, but as I drove home my jaw dropped. I had to take a alternate route since so many roads were closed. I passed house after house by the hospital that had been ravaged. I even saw a family -Mom, Dad, and three little girls- walking and holding hands through their neighborhood rubble just crying. I wanted to help but had no idea what to do. I was not prepared for this. These things don't happen here, and the news hadn't even mentioned that homes had been hit. So people came home to a stark reality.
My real concern that just makes me upset with our community and leaders are the lack of safety procedures. Homes aren't built with storm shelters or even basements. The cost of these items is like buying another car or more. But even worse than that is the fact that there are NO public shelters. None. Not in Moore. Not in Norman. These things come EVERY year, pretty much like clockwork. First week in May I KNOW that a tornado WILL pass within 1 MILE of my workplace. That is a fact, and there is nothing that will protect us from a direct hit, especially if it is an F3 or larger. Shouldn't this be a priority for this area? Doesn't CA have buildings made with earthquakes in mind? Doesn't FL have hurricane insurance for everything? Where are Oklahoma's shelters?! People's lives are at stake every year. This is criminal negligence.
Why not dig yourself a little 'dug out' in the back yard----in WW2 in the UK we called them Anderson Shelters!!----Google it!!
Unfortunately for many people in the midwest your states are controlled by republican governors and republican state legislators who put corporate interest first and citizen safety way down on the list. Remember, these are the guys pushing for an end to the Emergency alert system, a defunding of the National Weather Service and the EPA just to name a few. So I guess what I am saying is that who you vote for really does matter. Of course you could still vote for people like Cantor who will provide assistance only if we cut the federal budget someplace else to help the people in his state. I'm just saying...worthy of some thought.
They don't end up actually playing softball with that hail do they?
Sometimes! Just don't ever get hit with one. It's one heavy chunk of ice! Actually I have no idea if anyone really plays softball/baseball/volleyball, soccer with them or not. I can only speak about what goes on at my own place. Occassionally my son see's how far he can toss the larger hail over the back pasture fence just to see how far they'll go. Otherwise he brings them in to use as ice cubes, no kidding!
So..."mass destruction" huh....did Saddam hide his weapons of mass destruction in the wind and now they are bearing down on us? RUN!!!!
All this property destruction should be 'good for business'----particularly the Construction Industry!!-----I wonder how the insurance companies are going to react!!---raise their rates, I guess!
It frightens me not only on how uneducated so many can be. Yet the evil destructic cruel God they believe in that they attatch " All loving" to whiel talkign about "Destruction and death". Are you that foolish?
A number of the 'Founding Fathers' were "Deists"-----that is the belief that after God made everything he then said "Now you are on your own" and he left!!----------makes sense to me!!
Yep its spring and here comes the twister..No different from year to year...People who live in these zones know more about the weather than MSNBC who thinks the sky has fallen and panic...ZOMG..
Hope all stay safe, and no touch downs for any tornado's!
Why is it that people on the left have to find a political slant to everything. I work for one of Warren Buffets Insurance companies. And have had to fly into the storm belt almost every year for the last 20 years. the storms are no worse or less worse than any other time in the last 2 decades. give the politics a rest. After Katrina you all said "we told you so" I have only had to go help out in one Hurricane since. After the gulf oil spill 2 years ago the gulf was going to be destroyed. How many of you remember mount St Helens? Mother earth takes care of herself. The politicians and scientist are all lieing to us. It is all about money. Anarchy is the only way left.
Lived in Kansas / moved from Kansas / 2 automobiles literally destroyed by hail the size of baseballs, holes punched through the home's roof. No, thank you, the weather is just too vicious.
Whether or not the storms are getting worse neither proves, nor disproves Global Warming. What proves, or disproves it is worldwide average temperatures. Prior to the 20th century, there was a fair amount of temperature recordings. In the last century the recordings increased drasticly in quantity, and quality. Ice cores, and ocean cores help with indications of weather for thousands of years. In ten years we'll have a better idea of exactly what's happening than we do now. Waiting until then to start taking measures to reduce our contribitions to the worlds carbon dioxide levels is like watching rain filling up a resovoir, and waiting until it starts going over the top of the dam before taking measures to save the dam. Hoewever, at this particula rmoment in time, the people in the danger zone of the tornado warnings are just concerned with getting out of it with as little damage as possible. Please argue over Global Warming after this storm is gone.
I like the change NWS made by using much stronger language in its warning statements. People need to learn and understand that these advisories are not a joke and are issued for a reason. Too many people do not take them seriously; they insist the forecasters don't know what they are talking about. Even worse, they take the "wait and see" approach. With a tornado, this means you are reducing your window of time to take all necessary measures to survive down to a handful of minutes; instead, they could have the disaster kit in the storm shelter and all they have to do is go into the bunker when the sirens go off. The cemetaries are full of people who made these kind of mistakes when it comes to tornados.
On a closing note, if anyone with NWS reads these posts, I would highly recommend they use even stronger language for the upcoming hurricane season. In the aftermath of Tropical Storm Irene last year, I saw what could only be described as bumbling beyond comprehension in the Northeast US on the part of state governments and public utilities. The conventional wisdom of having a three to five day emergency kit, based on what I will outline below, simply will not get the job done because state governments are not up to the job of managing a hurricane; you need a minimum of one to two months of supplies along with a quick, efficient way to create potable drinking water (think man-portable filtration and not bleach, boiling and all the other absurdly time-consuming B.S. that goes with it). The utility companies are worthless because the only sure-fire way to get them to do their jobs is to have the National Guards in charge of the utility crews, with shoot-to-kill orders if they start f#cking off.
Rhode Island established the gold standard for pi$$-poor performance. Anytime I needed updates on power outages, I had to call a local country music radio station; they had updated numbers from EMA that were not available if you called EMA. In effect, they were doing EMA's job, and doing it much better. Public utilities were doing "wallet biopsies" before restoring power; wealthy towns got restored in 24 hours while poorer towns were restored in four to five days. I only once saw two utility trucks in the same place at the same time, and that was in front of a Dunkin Donuts which, you guessed it, was without power. The governor's chief of staff needed to be lectured for nearly 30 minutes on the consequences of public utilities not doing their job, especially when you consider the outages were going to run past the first of the month; there were going to be thousands of people going to food stores to buy food on EBT cards only to find stores with no food and no power, which would have looked absolutely wonderful on local and national news. Power was miraculously restored within two hours after I finished lecturing the chief of staff. A major truck road running from RI though CT was shut down for nearly 48 hours due to downed trees and power lines; not one National Guardsman with a chain saw nor one utility truck in nearly two days, but there was one state trooper assigned to saw-horse detail. What was the governor's response? He congratulated the utility companies for their "performance", in a manner similar to that of a losing debate team captain after having his a$$ handed to him on a paper plate, when a royal a$$-reaming was perfectly justified.
NWS, make it clear to people in your warning statements that people should prepare to be on their own for an extended period of time and not to expect the state government and state EMA to be up to the job of dealing with a hurricane; Rhode Island is all the proof you need.
Hype hype hype... It's just another spring day in Kansas.
Whatever you say, Dorothy.
damn i'm gonna get wet...eeewww..lol
Well all i can say is get your baseball bats out.
I say it is all Obama's fault.
Looks like Global Warming is getting expensive.
Gobal warming is not causing today's tornados. You really ought to learn a bit about the physics of the atmosphere before making such ignorant statements.
97% percent of climate scientists would disagree with you.
But please Wally, do tell, what IS causing today's abnormal tornadoes?
Liberals don't care about tornadoes in flyover country and red states..DUH.
Why should they? Its just cleaning the gene pool.
They predicted this tornado outbreak WHEN? This weather pattern matched up with WHAT? This situation is going to affect WHO? The outbreak will happen WHERE? Now all they need to find out is HOW and WHY! I think it is that "old blind sow finally found an acorn" prediction. My pet weather rock has been making noise for days! Good Luck ALL!
Has it occurred to you that the predictability of the weather has deteriorated because the normal weather patterns are changing due to global warming? No, that would be too obvious. Must be a Librul conspiracy.