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Jeff Roberson / AP
Storm clouds roll in over Busch Stadium as the St. Louis Cardinals prepare to take on the Milwaukee Brewers in a baseball game on Friday night.
Powerful storms rumbled across parts of the Midwest and the southern Plains late Friday evening, leaving a total of four people dead.
The storms left damaged homes, downed trees and thousands of power outages in their wake as they swept across Oklahoma, weather.com reported.
Two adults and an infant were found dead inside their destroyed mobile home after it was blown into a ravine in Nowata County, according to Doug Sonenburg, undersheriff of Nowata County.
The storms sent high winds through much of northeastern Oklahoma late Friday, causing road closures and evacuations in some areas.
Read more from The Weather Channel
Public Service Company of Oklahoma reported 17,790 customers without power, and at least 2,885 Oklahoma Gas and Electric customers were without electricity.
The Oklahoma Highway Patrol also reported that Ash Grove, Mo., resident Jimmy King was killed when straight-line winds flipped the semi he was driving onto a cement barrier wall and trapped him inside near Afton, according to The Associated Press.
Troopers said the 70-year-old King was pinned in the wreckage for nearly three hours and died at the scene of massive injuries.
NBC Learn explains how tornadoes form.
Utility crews were also scrambling to address scattered power outages in southern, central and eastern Missouri after powerful thunderstorms swept across the state.
Several high schools postponed their Friday night football games to avoid taking chances.
The storms brought large hail to the Ozarks and the Columbia and Jefferson City areas, along with winds up to 70 mph that snapped power poles and trees in several communities.
Emergency managers received scattered reports of roofs torn from barns and streets blocked by fallen trees and power lines. The National Weather Service posted a few tornado warnings, but no funnel clouds were reported.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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Leave a Comment:
I swear between the wild fires and the freak rain storms the okees don't have a chance. Maybe they ought to just stay inside until someone else tells them to come out, because they don't have any sense, what-so-ever!
they were inside when they died you idiot. or do you have any sense what-so-ever? NOT
Are you that insensitive, or just can't help making stupid remarks? You obviously have no sense yourself.
Global warming is no respecter of persons...don't know why it chooses who it chooses to kill...shame...they were good people, too...they didn't deserve this.
I knew it wouldn't take long before some idiot brought up "Global Warming" like there haven't been storms until recently! There's always been storms, always will be.
WE need to pray for those who lost their lives and for those who lost properties. And we need to start praying everyday, build up our faith, love and resoect others-hopefully this will keep the devil back. No more blaming, bashing or disrepect, only love and gratitude. Be graceful that it didn't happen to you and yours. be thankful to the highest power who sustained and keep you center.
Wow so you know this person on a personnel level to make the idiot call?
That was somebodys family members and 4 month old baby you ass! But I guess your right, a 4 month old baby has all the sense to know when its safe. You must be a real high class person though right to laugh at their deaths? So glad you could clear that up for us "okees" thanks!
de2or, yu are nincompoop.
Condolences to the families and friends of those lost. Hoping any injured or otherwise affected a speedy recovery.
Our thoughts and prayers are with you.
There should be more stringent regulations for mobile homes. They should be required some sort of underground shelter. It doesn't need to be big or expensive, just available. Also, I know in Florida, mobile homes are required to have large cables buried deep in the ground to keep from being torn off of their foundations. It's not perfect but it does help. These deaths are senseless and unnecessary.
Which would make the trailers more expensive to live in. Folks that can afford better already live in better housing. Folks that can't afford better would be homeless. Do you think they'd be better off then?
The mobile home was a double-wide sitting on blocks and the home's debris was found in a ravine a few hundred feet away.... this should be a reminder that foundation tie downs are more important than satellite TV.
Was the satellite TV mechanism still in place where the mobile home used to be?
I was wondering about the tie down straps my self.
Living in Oklahoma, I can tell you that people living in mobile homes have been warned for years and years to leave their homes and go to shelters that are always available. The question is, why don't they?
Even with the best tie-downs, mobile homes are NOT a good place to be when there is a tornado. I live in a double-wide. I finally got one of those in-ground storm shelters (paid a lot for it); we used to take shelter with a neighbor who had a brick house across the street, but the house is empty now because the neighbors divorced and the house was foreclosed. Even that brick house is no guarantee of survival in a tornado. Sometimes, underground is the ONLY place to be in a storm. Unfortunately, if people are poor enough to need to live in a mobile home, buying an in-ground shelter may be out of their price range. FEMA does have a program that will pay the majority of the cost of having one installed, but the waiting lists are long, and the number of hoops you have to jump through is ridiculous.
We never had to use the shelter until a year ago, when those deadly storms went through Alabama. We went down into the shelter four times in April of last year- twice on the 15th, when three people just down the road from us were killed, and twice on the 27th, when 238 people in Alabama were killed. We used the shelter once more, earlier this year, when a tornado passed about a half-mile from our house. The money I spent on that shelter was money well-spent.
re: 2.5
Probably because they're POOR, sosick. Rich people don't usually live in trailers. If you're poor, relocating isn't always an option.
I used to live in a mobil home park in Central Texas and can tell you if can get very scary in Tornado season, i believe that Mobil Home parks should be required, maybe, becauses of Government interference, to have community storm shelters. If i owned a Mobil Home park i would have one in different locations of the park depending on how many lots there were.I was in Georgetown Texas when the F5 hit Jarrel only 8 miles North of where i was and we could see it comming and we all got the hell out of our Mobil Homes and went to gas stations etc looking for a stonger building, still in a direct hit even a direct hit by a F-5 would have destroyed that building too the only thing left of buildings in Jarrel Texas was the concrete slab.The wind even pulled up the asphalt from the roads.The Storm Shelter would have to be 10' underground level at the top with steel doors to survive an F-5 direct hit. they say the winds in an F-5 can get over 300 MPH i believe it after seeing what it did in Jarrell Texas pulling up even ashhalt from the road.
Nice assumption that all people that live in mobile homes are poor.
The only truly tornado resistant home is a monolithic one.
http://www.monolithic.com/topics/homes
They cost 10% more to build. But are wind & fire resistant. You do get insurance savings because of the resistance. And they are energy efficient.
If , I had the money , I'd tear down my existing, and rebuild to one. I doubt many of the 1% live in them.
However, I do wonder why we build the same match box homes after a disaster?? Seems rather foolish to build to the same weak standards as before.
Devil: I did say "usually" and "probably". I never said that ONLY poor people live in trailers. That's your generalization, not mine.
I'm not what most people would consider to be poor, and I'm certainly not rich (probably not even solidly middle-class), but the trailer was what I could afford when I bought it. It's actually larger and nicer than an old site-built house I own in the city. We just needed to get out of the city and into a better school district; the one we were in had gone to Hell in the proverbial handbasket, and private school tuition was way out of my reach. I had watched our school district deteriorate over the course of about 18 years, and after my youngest daughter's 7th grade year, I could not send her back to that school. It had become the stereotypical inner-city ghetto school. Drugs, fights, assaults, even sexual assaults were happening on campus. My daughter was terrified of going to school; I literally had to drag her out the door every morning. The last day I set foot on that campus, a girl and boy were fighting in the parking lot. The girl stabbed the boy. That was a typical day at that school. It was cheaper to buy the trailer in the country than to pay for private school in the city. The small rural school district we moved into was just what she needed. I never had a problem getting her to go to school after we moved into the trailer.
I kept the old house in the city because the older kids were all working and going to college there, and the old house is cheaper than putting them in dorms. It's all a matter of perspective.
All it would take for an emergency shelter would be a narrow ditch, 2 feet deep, and a solid planked covering spiked down by metal fence post. It would be long enough to hold the expected number of users. A small opening at one end would allow for entrance.
Throw a bug bomb in about once a month to kill the black widows. (grin)
I know I would not live in that area without some kind of shelter.
Prayers to the famlies of the lost ones
Storms headed east, more to come.
they went through here yesterday.Luckly all we lost were some limbs and a router.
I'm in Springfield, and this city blows the siren when there are winds that high. My end of town didn't get much though. It just rained and blew and no tree limbs even fell that I could see, but on the south side, there were power outages all over the place.
I live in east central OK and in our news reports they did have a storm cellar but we had some wicked winds yesterday whether it was storming or not. They said there was thunder and lightning and nothing else and then the wind came out of nowhere, but there was a funnel sighting reported I guess...all I know is its a terrible thing to happen and I will never understand things like this. From the pictures of the home it looked like there was a moisture barrier but no hurricane straps, just sitting on bricks. I finally got my cellar and I dont mess around with storms around here, my place has the hurricane straps in the concrete runners but I dont care. Very very sad
it was tied down.....this was my aunt and uncle
I blame the governor of that state for all their problems
The governor of OK can make storms happen? Impressive.
@ DE2Or2010 : And they'd be safer where? In the mountains? : tornados, mudslides, flooding, forest fires, earthquakes? On the coast? : hurricanes, coastal flooding and erosion, inland tornatos spawned from hurricanes? The antarctic perhaps? : flooding due to melting glaciers? : Get my drift? No matter where you live, mansion or trailer, the effects of Mother Nature have to be respected, and when they come, you prepare as much as you can, and for what you can't, you just pray and hold on. God bless and be with the Victims.
I swear between the wild fires and the freak rain storms the okees don't have a chance. Maybe they ought to just stay inside until someone else tells them to come out, because they don't have any sense, what-so-ever!
Why is there always some Troll like you, De2Or2010, on MSN with some totally ignorant and heartless thing like that to say? Where do you live where everyone is intelligent and natural disasters never happen? Let us know, and we'll all move there.
Four people die and homes are devastated but they show a picture of Bush Stadium, how corporate and typical, then someone suggests it's about being inside or outside or okee, or someone suggests trailers should be yudayuda...what sort of people live in this country? Selling corporate while families die, bashing lifestyles of which some know nothing.
Trailers are supposed to have tie downs. And when the proverbial hits the fan, some of you will kill to live in a trailer.
I think they were showing the Dems that even with a storm in the area, the show must go on. In this case, a ball game.
im not jumping on any band wagons, im not a believer nor will i be until i see it with my own eye, but everything weather wise in the last year'ish really makes you wonder about this Dec. 2012 stuff?
good luck Oklahoma, prayers from Wisconsin.
I have been married for 25 years, last evening my husband got caught at work in Bolivar Missouri.
He called me to tell me that he loved me very much, he said it over and over and then told me that he thought they we getting hit by a tornado. Then he said goodbye and the phone cut off. It turned out to be radical wind and rain so blinding that they could not tell what was going on.
30 minutes later, they saw that they had RV`s flipped over. He made it home, and that was the best day of my life.
I see we have links to the Weather Channel in this article. Here in Joplin, Missouri, when the storm hit, it would have been SO nice to have the benefit of the Weather Channel radar. But the Weather Channel was showing a movie. It's just an entertainment channel now, and seldom shows weather when you need it. It's worthless when a storm happens.
As for warning sirens, they blew for this storm's havy rain and 50+ MPH winds the same way they did for the EF5 200+ MPH tornado in 2011 which killed 161 people. Public warning systems simply don't work effectively either. If the sirens blow and you don't take cover as if it WERE an EF5 tornado, then it's simply YOUR fault. And the sirens blow every time a strong storm goes through with some fairly strong wind and heavy rain. There's simply no way to know when you REALLY need to take cover from a REALLY strong storm. If you actually took cover every time a strong storm happens and the sirens blow, you'd spend a good part of every year lying in your bathtub or huddling in a basement.
God bless the Okies. Most of them are good people who know how to pull themselves up by their bootstraps after catastrophes and move on without whining and waiting for a handout!
Thank you Penelope2, for your wise statement. My entire family is from Oklahoma, and with a few exceptions, they are all hardworking folk who have never sought a handout. But every family has those sorry individuals that the rest of us just shake our heads over.
It is sad and infuriating to read statements that say it's their own fault for living there, or living in a mobile home. Oklahoma has always been a poor farm state, where people struggle to make ends meet. Yet they love their lives, and wouldn't change a thing.
I may not live there anymore (military family) but I am proud to call myself an Okie!
Romney/Ryan/Republicans caused global warming and will cause more of it which causes these massive storms coming more often, then they want to reduce your protection and help from firefighters, police, and infrastructure spending in fact they have already reduced that from their Tea Party congress actions and that is the only thing you get from the republicans, more problems and less help to fix them.
And today's award for "Stupidist Comment" goes to....YOU!
Bill: Your village called..they want their retard back.
Old Dog, You are wrong and always will be. You are an old dog who won't give up his bone. So ENJOY your hell...You BUILT it!
NBC is very good at explaining what happened after the fact. But NBC Universal is an owner of the Weather Channel. They could actually help people cope with the weather if they'd allow the Weather Channel to actually show weather anymore rather than "Storm Stories." As soon as NBC took over and ditched the weather format, we got "weatherman" Al Roker to entertain us. Adding insult to injury!
I see that Bain Capital is also a partial owner of TWC. No wonder it's gone to he**.
While all of you douche bags pontificate and throw rocks at each other, all I can think about is how terrified those poor people must have been when this happened. Have a little compassion and save the hurumph-a-rumphing for another topic. My prayers to their family in their time of loss.
Mobile homes are always the worst shelters to be in during a wind storm . Any one think the top 2 percent income earners would know what it feels like to have no sturdy storm shelter ? Doubt it .
The top two percent are very well protected for sure. And the Republican Party which serves them also serves the right wing Tea Party climate change deniers. I hope when the grandchildren of the Tea Baggers live in a Midwest shattered by the stronger Spring storms, or in a coastal city underwater from the rising ocean, that they feel warm and comfortable with their grandparents' right wing ideology.
And I know something about being terrified too. I was in Joplin, Missouri, on the afternoon of May 22, 2011.
Spoken like a true liberal blamer Clarence. I suppose now you're going to enlighten us as to how the evil republicans create these acts of nature aimed solely against the democrats. When will you learn that politics have nothing to do with the weather? People live where they live for various reasons, some beyond their control, and I haven't seen much evidence of present administration trying to ease any of those burdens. Why not just drop the cynical political rhetoric for awhile and have some compassion for your fellow man. The good people in Oklahoma are proud of where they live, and unlike those wrapped up in themselves, they know how to pull together and help their neighbors in times like these, instead of bashing them for where they live. They deserve understanding and respect right now. They have no more control over the weather than any of the rest of us. God bless the people of Oklahoma. Be proud of your state because you're strong enough to pull together and recover.
The people who deny the long term affects of climate change certainly do have an effect on the long term climate and weather patterns. And the right wing Republican crazies deny climate change purely on the basis of far right wing ideology, and in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary.
I have nothing but compassion for the people in Oklahoma who were killed and injured. At the same time, I have nothing but contempt for the politics of Oklahoma. The right wing climate change deniers of Oklahoma certainly could do something about their own long term climate and weather.
Time to move on, the radical left is here with their looney political crap. Seems you libtards can't even comment on an article about severe weather without having to insult the segment of the population that doesn't agree with your political views! It must be hard work to ge angry all the time.
Well if there are any bigger haters than the "Obama liberal" haters of the Republican far right wing, I've not seen it.
I assumed it was going to be about another shooting until I saw "mobile homes" and "Oklahoma" in the same sentence.
God bless their families.
I have been watching the weather for many years. There has never been a series of storms like we have had in the Midwest like we have had in the last few years. Because of my out doors activities I have watched. Yes there were an occasional storm that damaged much property. I think it is about time we all set back and look at what is happening. The man upstairs is warning us.
The internet has turned people or have the bare minimum or education into great scholars and thinkers. Even if they cant type a logical response. How does one turn a weather tragedy into a political rant? I have no idea and dont want to live in that fantasy world either. god bless everyone, whether i agree with them or not!!!!!