A television station in Kansas was forced to evacuate during a live broadcast on Sunday afternoon after a massive tornado — one of three that ripped through the Plains States over the weekend — touched down in downtown Wichita.

Dramatic video footage shows J.D. Rudd, a meteorologist for NBC affiliate KSN, rushing out of the camera frame as station staffers frantically flee the set shortly after 4:15 p.m., following nearly two hours of continuous live coverage of the wrathful storm.

“It appears that it is time for all of us to get to shelter,” a man can be heard saying off-camera. “Get to shelter right now! Everybody ... let’s go!”

Station employees scattered and bolted to the basement as warning sirens blared and the cyclone whipped across downtown Wichita, according to KSN producer Kathy Ivy.

“Downtown Wichita was in the target zone,” Ivy said. “We were in the target zone.”

Fortunately, the storm lifted the second it arrived at the KSN studio’s doors, leaving the facility largely unharmed.

Thousands of homes and businesses lost power during the brunt of the tornado’s tear through town, but it missed the most populated areas of the city.

There were no reports of fatalities or injuries in Kansas on Monday morning. Tornadoes killed two people and injured 21 in Oklahoma on Sunday.

Survivors of the tornadoes that devastated two towns in Texas on Wednesday night described their terror as the violent storm tore apart their homes, killing six people and injuring dozens more.

The last of those believed to be missing have been accounted for in the hard-hit Hood County town of Granbury, where a cluster of more than 60 homes built by Habitat for Humanity were among the worst off.

The Zapata family took refuge in the bathtub of their Granbury home as the twisters approached on Wednesday.

“I couldn’t stop screaming or crying,” Ana Zapata, 18, said of how she sheltered with her parents and two siblings under a pair of mattresses.

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“Feeling the walls shake and the tub under you is feeling like it is going to lift up any time,” her father Paul Zapata told KXAS. “Thank God we’re here, we’re alive.”

Joseph Youngblood, 10, was playing outside of a friend’s house in Granbury when the sirens went off. The skies darkened ahead of what the weather service said was an EF-4 tornado, meaning it packed winds of between 160 and 200 miles per hour.

“We started hearing the tornado sirens go off and then we look up at the clouds and we see the tornado twisting, so we all rushed in the bathroom,” Youngblood said. “I just went and ducked somewhere. I didn’t even care. I was so scared.”

The boy took refuge with his friend’s family in their house’s bathroom, where his friend’s father struggled to hold the bathroom door closed against the powerful winds that were collapsing the house around them.

"[The tornado] was starting to get more power and then he was, like, barely hanging on because the tornado was about to suck him outside," Youngblood told KXAS.

The Rancho Brazos and DeCordova Ranch neighborhoods in Granbury remained off limits after 97 of the 110 area homes were damages or destroyed.

“Some were found in houses. Some were found around houses,” Hood County Sheriff Roger Deeds said of the people killed in the storm. “There was a report that two of these people that they found were not even near their homes, so we’re going to search the area out there.”

The dark funnels of as many as 16 tornadoes touched down in northern Texas on Wednesday evening, according to a preliminary report by the National Weather Service.

Slideshow: Tornadoes hit Texas

Ralph Lauer / EPA

A series of tornadoes ripped across northern Texas, killing six and injuring dozens more.

Launch slideshow

The less powerful EF-3 tornado struck the nearby town of Cleburne, sweeping away parts of several homes, including one belonging to the family of Geraldine Williams.

“It’s devastating. It’s been ravaged,” Williams said as she sifted debris. The roof of the house was torn clean off, and mattresses were sucked up through the ceiling and tossed down in the backyard.

“It’s just weird, it’s so indiscriminate,” Williams told KXAS. “Look, that picture is hanging. Everything in the china cabinet was intact, but then look at my dad’s study, it just went ‘poof.’”

All of the deceased were from the Rancho Brazos neighborhood, authorities have said, where the non-profit group Habitat for Humanity had constructed 61 homes.

The dead were identified on Thursday as Jose Tovas Alvarez, 34; Robert Whitehead, 60; Tommy Martin, 61; Marjari Davis, 82; Leo Stefanski, 83; and Glenda White, whose age was unknown. 

Related:

• Search for Texas tornado survivors: Some victims 'not even near their homes'
• 6 dead, 7 missing as tornadoes rip through Texas
• Texas tornadoes devastate neighborhood built by residents, Habitat for Humanity

Slideshow: Tornadoes hit Texas

Ralph Lauer / EPA

A series of tornadoes ripped across northern Texas, killing six and injuring dozens more.

Launch slideshow

With six people already confirmed dead, rescue crews in a northern Texas town continued their search for victims Friday after a wave of 16 tornadoes crashed through the region, ripping homes to pieces and laying waste to large swaths of the area.

In Granbury, seven people were still missing after an EF4 tornado packing winds up to 200 mph destroyed a neighborhood late Wednesday, the National Weather Service said. 

Hood County Sheriff Roger Deeds told reporters that the search for victims had to be expanded because "two of these people that they found were not even near their homes, so we're going to have to search the area out there."

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Nearly 100 damaged homes remained off limits Thursday night as crews in the hardest-hit areas continued to a search for survivors and victims.

Hundreds of people had checked in with authorities to say they had survived.

The violent twisters flattened homes, uprooted trees, tossed trailers onto cars and left hundreds homeless in morth Texas. About 100 people were injured. 

All of the dead – confirmed to all be adults — were from the Rancho Brazos neighborhood on the outskirts of Granbury where most of the homes were built in the past five years by residents themselves and the Christian charity group Habitat for Humanity. Granbury is a town of 8,000 people about 65 miles southwest of Dallas.

Officials on Thursday night released the names of the dead: Jose Tovas Alvarez, 34, Robert Whitehead, 60, Tommy Martin, 61, Marjari Davis, 82, Leo Stefanski, 83, and Glenda White, whose age wasn't known.  The identities of the missing were not made public.

“We’re going to keep on looking, we’re not going to give up until every piece of debris is turned over and we know that we’re good to go” Deeds said at a news briefing Thursday evening.

He said that 97 homes sustained damage, from slight to total destruction. Electricity and water were still out to those homes and he said it could be days before residents could return. 

“With the gas and electricity hazards we’re not going to take a chance in the area,” he said.

“It's rough, very rough. Everything's demolished," a resident told KXAS as she rushed away from the neighborhood with her arms around a child. "It was like hell."

Texas Gov. Rick Perry, along with other state and local officials, will visit Granbury on Friday.

The National Weather Service in Dallas-Fort Worth said 16  tornadoes were confirmed to have ripped through north Texas.

The tornado that hit Granbury Wednesday night was rated an EF-4 by the National Weather Service, meaning that winds reached between 160 and 200 miles per hour. 

It was the first EF-4 in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area since 1994, National Weather Service spokesman Mark Fox said.

The tornadoes seemed to have caused less damage in Cleburne, where Mayor Scott Cain told KXAS. The town did “have the potential for some injuries,” Cain said.

Some witnesses have said the tornado that swept through Johnson County may have been as much as a mile wide. While that twister that hit Granbury was smaller, but it struck a more populated area, according to Fox.

People in the affected areas had a little more than the national average of 13 minutes warning before the tornadoes struck, according to the National Weather Service.

“The warning came well before the tornadoes,” Fox said. Residents of Montague County were alerted about 15 to 30 minutes before the storm struck, and in Hood County a warning was issued 25 minutes before the tornado touched down.

NBC News' John Newland and Matthew DeLuca contributed to this report.

Related:

• 6 dead, 7 missing as tornadoes rip through Texas
• Texas tornadoes destroy neighborhood built by residents, Habitat for Humanity

This story was originally published on Thu May 16, 2013 6:58 PM EDT

Dozens of families who lived in homes they helped build with their own hands saw their neighborhood devastated by a tornado that struck north Texas on Wednesday night.

Habitat for Humanity, a Christian group that organizes volunteers to build homes for the needy, had worked with residents to construct 61 houses in the Rancho Brazos neighborhood that was battered by the twister in Granbury, Texas. 

Aerial footage taken Thursday showed home after home in Granbury completely demolished, with others severely damaged. Six adults have been confirmed dead after what the National Weather Service said were three tornadoes that swept through Montague and Hood counties in northern Texas.

Rancho Brazos was a “well-knit” neighborhood were people kept their lawns trimmed and their single-story homes in top shape, said Asa Maddox, 68.

Ralph Lauer / EPA

Debris is piled into a fence after a tornado tore thru the area in Granbury, Texas, USA, 16 May 2013.

“The neighborhood was pretty immaculate,” he said.

The winds that whipped up on Wednesday night spared Maddox’s 897-square-foot home, but lifted up the metal lawnmower shed in his yard and blew out the windows on a van in his driveway, he said. He and his wife took shelter in their home’s laundry room with their dog.

“I had heard the sirens going off and it was a continuous blast from the sirens, so I knew that there was some sort of a weather deal coming on,” Maddox said. “Then all of a sudden my lights went out and it started hailing, I mean everywhere from pea-sized all the way up to baseball-sized hail coming down and really hitting my roof.”

Gusts bent trees in his yard and sent debris flying toward his home, Maddox said.

“I could hear a real loud noise, and as I listened it was getting louder and louder,” Maddox said as the tornado approached his home around 8 p.m. local time on Wednesday. “I kind of peeked out around and I saw the wind was blowing real, real, real hard.”

Maddox drove out of the neighborhood in the dark Wednesday night. His home was mostly spared, he said.

“The mobile home that was on my right is there. The roof’s pretty much gone,” Maddox said. “The other side of my house is another Habitat house about the same size as mine and it was still there.”

Another Habitat-built home down the street was not so fortunate.

“It just shattered. It disappeared,” Maddox said.

A retired service technician who worked in a mobile-home factory, Maddox said he has been in the Rancho Brazos home he built with the help of Habitat for Humanity volunteers since 2009. It was a “joyous occasion” when he moved into the home equipped with all-new appliances, he said. He said he has been in touch with his insurance agent and expects to be back on his feet soon.

“I thank God for sparing my house and myself, and I feel real, real bad about the people who lost their house, lost everything,” he said. “If there was a way that I could help them I would.”

Habitat for Humanity volunteers were working to finish two more homes for waiting families on the day the twister struck, said Michelle Kennedy, assistant director for Trinity Habitat for Humanity, a nearby affiliate that was supporting the local Hood County Habitat organization on Thursday.

“The house that was under construction this week survived,” Kennedy said. “The house that was ready to dedicate on Saturday was completely destroyed.”

Kennedy said she helped one homeowner who collapsed in tears in the hallway of Granbury’s First Christian Church, where about 50 Rancho Brazos residents took shelter with help from the Red Cross.

“It’s devastating,” Kennedy said.

“The thing that’s different about Habitat is that families actually work in the building of the homes,” she said. “They have a deep interest not only in their homes but in the community. This devastation, it almost gives them a sense of hopelessness.”

Habitat of Hood County’s newsletter recounts the work done by its volunteers over the years, including some overseas. Families contribute at least 300 hours of work to building the home they will move in to, according to the newsletter. Each house costs about $50,500 to build, according to the group's website.

Volunteers from Hood County also began partnering with Habitat for Humanity Kyrgyzstan in 2003, according to a post on the non-profit’s website. The Texans helped build homes for nearly two dozen families in Kyrgyzstan, HFH Hood County executive director Carol Davidson said in the post.

Related:

• 6 dead, 7 missing as tornadoes rip through Texas
• Aftermath of deadly EF-4 tornado

North Texas residents took in the devastation on Thursday wreaked by a series of tornadoes that killed six and injured dozens more in what Hood County Sheriff Roger Deeds described as a “nightmare” scenario.

Seven of 14 people who had previously been unaccounted for had checked in by Thursday morning, Deeds said at a press conference on Thursday. About 100 people were reported injured and as many as 250 were homeless after the swarm of twisters that ripped up trees and knocked down homes on Wednesday evening.

The six deceased were all adults, Deeds said. There have been no reports of injuries to first responders, the sheriff said.

“Everything’s running smooth, everything’s looking good,” Deeds said of recovery efforts on Thursday.

Full coverage from NBCDFW.com

Granbury, a town of 8,000 about 65 miles southwest of Dallas, was thought to be among the worst-hit areas. Images of the town revealed leveled homes, badly damaged cars, uprooted trees and downed power lines.

Nineteen buildings and 17 mobile homes were destroyed in Hood County, the sheriff’s office said in an initial damage assessment on Thursday. Seventeen more buildings showed major damage, while more than 40 showed minor damage including to windows and roofing shingles.

“It's rough, very rough. Everything's demolished," a resident told KXAS as she hurried away from the neighborhood with her arms around a child. "It was like hell."

Mike Fuentes / AP

Johnny Ortiz, left, and James South carry Miguel Morales, who was injured in a tornado, to an ambulance in Granbury, Texas, on Wednesday.

The six people who were confirmed dead were in the Rancho Brazos neighborhood on the outskirts of Granbury, Deeds said. He added that the homes there were mostly built within the past five years by Habitat for Humanity.

“I had three different storms that came through but this is the worst one,” Deeds said.

The tornadoes swept through the towns of Granbury and nearby Cleburne, causing “heavy damage,” Deeds said. The search for other people who might have gotten caught up in the storm continued with day break.

“I’ve been assured by my deputies on the scene that they’re pretty confident with the six that they found, but there was a report that two of these people that they found were not even near their homes. So we’re going to have to search the area out there,” Deeds said.

The tornado that hit Granbury was rated EF-4 by the National Weather Service in a preliminary report, meaning that winds reached between 160 and 200 miles per hour.

The tornadoes seemed to have caused less damage in Cleburne, where Mayor Scott Cain told KXAS. The town did “have the potential for some injuries,” Cain said.

The National Weather Service reported three tornadoes across Montague and Hood counties. Storm surveys to determine the extent of the damage were planned for Hood, Johnson, Montague, and Parker counties on Thursday, the weather service’s Dallas-Fort Worth office announced. At least ten tornadoes touched ground across Texas on Wednesday evening according to Mark Fox, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Dallas-Fort Worth.

Some witnesses have said the tornado that swept through Johnson County may have been as much as a mile wide. While that twister that hit Granbury was smaller, it struck a more populated area and was “just as destructive,” according to Fox.

People in the affected areas had a little more than the national average of 13 minutes warning before the tornadoes struck, according to the National Weather Service.

“The warning came well before the tornadoes,” Fox said. Residents of Montague County were alerted about 15 to 30 minutes before the storm struck, and in Hood County a warning was issued 25 minutes before the tornado touched down.

Nearly forty patients were taken to Lake Granbury Medical Center and 18 discharged, with the majority of injuries including cuts, broken bones, and some head injuries. A total of eight patients were admitted to the emergency room at the Texas Health Harris Methodist Hospital in Fort Worth. Two of the patients were in critical condition as of 4 a.m. local time.

“I’ve been at LGMC for over 12 years, and we have never seen a community catastrophe with as many injuries as we did through last night,” said Kyle McCombs, chief of staff at Lake Granbury Medical Center, in a press release. “However, these are the types of disasters that our medical team continuously prepares for.”

Relocation centers have been set up Granbury Methodist and First Christian churches in Hood County.

The tornado outbreak was by far the year's deadliest, the weather service said. Prior to Wednesday night, there had been three fatal tornadoes this year, killing one person each in Georgia, Mississippi and eastern Texas.

Anita Foster of the American Red Cross, which opened two shelters in Granbury, told KXAS that 42 people had spent the night in the shelters. She added that only a quarter of people who are left homeless in such disasters typically seek shelter with the Red Cross, indicating that many more had been affected.

"We’re going to have a lot of people who are going to need some help," she said, adding, "It was a really frightening evening. It was a devastating event for our community."

The tornadoes, normal for this time of year, formed as the warm, moist air of the Texas springtime encountered an upper level storm between Wichita and Dallas, Fox said. A few thunderstorms hung over the state on Thursday but the weather system headed eastward for the most part, he said.

Severe weather was expected to sweep into some parts of the Midwest and Plains states with the potential for tornadoes heading into the weekend, the Weather Channel reported.

About 60 departures have been canceled and 70 flights diverted from Dallas-Forth Worth International Airport, spokesman David Magana told the Associated Press.

NBC News' John Newland and Andrew Rafferty contributed to this report.

This story was originally published on Thu May 16, 2013 12:39 AM EDT

A tornado tore through the New Orleans area Wednesday, damaging homes and ripping trees out of the ground, as intense storms lashed the area with rain.

The National Weather Service (NWS) said the twister was one of two that caused damage in Kenner, Louisiana, near New Orleans International Airport.

No injuries were reported, according to the Times Picayune’s website NOLA.com, but about 5,000 Entergy Louisiana customers lost electrical service.

The first tornado's path stretched two miles and 75 yards wide and packed winds of 75 mph. The second's path was a half a mile long and 50 yards wide and recorded winds of 90 mph.

Residents posted pictures on social media of torn roofs, fallen trees and flash floods caused by torrential rains, weather.com reported.

Witness Adine Humphrey told NOLA.com: "The wind picked up. The rain picked up. You kind of heard that noise like a train a little bit. I looked next door. I seen the debris going in circles. I ripped my mother inside."

The NWS said the airport tower lost power during the storms, which struck during the middle of the day on Wednesday.

This story was originally published on Thu Apr 25, 2013 4:21 AM EDT

Updated at 3:37 a.m. ET: TUPELO, Miss. - A swarm of tornadoes tore through several counties in southern Mississippi and Alabama on Sunday, injuring at least 10 people and ripping apart hundreds of homes and other buildings, including parts of the University of Southern Mississippi, authorities said.

The Forrest County seat of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and the adjacent town of Petal, both about 100 miles southeast of Jackson, the state capital, bore the brunt of storms that struck less than an hour before dark.

The tornado that plowed through the Hattiesburg area was believed to have reached three-quarters of a mile in diameter at times, said Anna Weber, a National Weather Service meteorologist.

The weather service counted three separate twisters in south-central Mississippi on Sunday evening, Weber said.

In neighboring southwestern Alabama, authorities reported a flurry of seven tornadoes across three counties, including one that damaged 46 homes in Clark County, Weather Service meteorologist Keith Williams said.

About 100 houses or more were damaged or destroyed in Petal, Mississippi, alone, and several businesses were hard hit there as well, including a hardware store reduced to rubble, Mayor Hal Marx told Reuters.

'Shaken up and in shock'
He said a number of residents suffered minor injuries but no one was reported seriously hurt. "Mostly people are just shaken up and in shock," he said.

Jeff Rent, a spokesman for the state Emergency Management Agency, said he had reports of at least 10 people injured throughout four stricken Mississippi counties, including eight who were taken to hospitals in Marion County.

More coverage from weather.com

Emergency management officials said no firm estimates of property losses were immediately available. Power outages were widespread.

Emergency management spokesman Greg Flynn said a search-and-rescue team from the nearby town of McComb was being called in to help look through debris for anyone who might be trapped.

On the Hattiesburg campus of the University of Southern Mississippi, alma mater of retired National Football League star quarterback Brett Favre, the storm damaged several buildings, including a performing arts center and an alumni house, the university said in a statement.

PhotoBlog: Tornado hits college campus

The twister also heavily damaged a high school stadium complex and blew a truck onto the school's baseball diamond, officials said.

Kris Walters, 40, a Baptist minister for the USM campus, said he and two of his children took shelter in a closet with a mattress on top of them until the storm passed, adding that his house escaped serious damage.

"I have lived here 40 years, and this is the first tornado I have ever seen like this," he told Reuters.

Video footage showed what appeared to be a large, gray tornado, filmed from a distance, churning through town as a cloud of debris swirled around it.

Rent, the state emergency management spokesman, said Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant had declared a state of emergency in four Mississippi counties - Forrest, Lamar, Marion and Lawrence - and other areas hit by the storms.

The Hattiesburg area also suffered heavy property damage from Hurricane Katrina in 2005.