OKLAHOMA CITY.-A tornado destroyed homes and downed trees and power lines as it passed through a small town in Oklahoma, one of several tornadoes in the central United States during a series of powerful storms that forecasters said could continue into the early hours of Tuesday.
The tornado tore through the town of Barnsdall, population 1,000, which is a 40-minute drive north of Tulsa, on Monday night.
Security forces and residents assessed the damage in a neighborhood amid flashes of lightning and heavy rain, according to news footage on local television stations. The tornado had ripped the roof off a house before dumping it onto the street. Police Chief Eddie Virden told KOTV that as of 11 p.m., no deaths had been confirmed.
The National Weather Service (NWS) in Tulsa had warned in the afternoon that a “large, life-threatening tornado” was headed toward Barnsdall, with gusts of up to 70 miles per hour (112 kilometers) per hour. . Meteorologist Brad McGavock said there was initially no information available about the size of the meteor or how fast it had moved.
The storms began earlier Monday with gusty winds and rain. But after the sun set, tornadoes were spotted in northern Oklahoma. At one point during the night, a storm in the small town of Covington “produced tornadoes intermittently for an hour,” according to the NWS. Throughout the area, wind turbines turned rapidly in the wind and heavy rain.
In Kansas, some areas received large hail balls measuring 3 inches (7.6 centimeters) in diameter.
The storms hit Oklahoma as areas such as Sulfur and Holdenville recovered from another tornado that killed four people and left thousands without power late last month. Both the Great Plains and the North Central United States have experienced tornadoes this spring.
The Oklahoma State Emergency Operations Center, which coordinates its storm response from a bunker near the state Capitol, remained active since last week’s deadly storms.
The Weather Service said more than 3.4 million people, 1,614 schools and 159 hospitals in Oklahoma, parts of southern Kansas and northern Texas faced increased severe threats from tornadoes on Monday.
Monte Tucker, a farmer and rancher in the western Oklahoma town of Sweetwater, spent Monday placing some of his tractors and heavy equipment in barns to protect them from hail. He said he had warned his neighbors that they could come to his house if the weather became dangerous.
“We built a house 10 years ago, and my stubborn wife dug in and made sure we built a safe room,” Tucker said. The entire first floor, she noted, is built with reinforced concrete walls.
Oklahoma and Kansas were under a high risk weather advisory on Monday.
The post shared below is from the moment when a man recorded the heavy rains and in a few seconds the tornado lifted part of the roof of the place where he was, while the alarms sounded.
This is not an alert level that is activated every day or every spring, said Bill Bunting, deputy director of the Storm Prediction Center.
“It is the highest threat level we can assign,” he said.
The risk level is due to an unusual circumstance: winds of up to 75 mph (46 km/h) hit Colorado’s Front Rage region, which includes the Denver area, on Monday.
Those winds were due to a low pressure system north of Colorado that also drew moisture from the Gulf of Mexico, raising the risk of severe weather in the Plains, according to the NWS’s Denver office.
Colorado was not at risk of tornadoes or thunderstorms.
Storms were expected throughout the week in the United States. The east and south of the country would bear the brunt of the rest of the week, affecting Indianapolis, Memphis, Nashville, St. Louis and Cincinnati, cities where more than 21 million people live. Skies should clear by the weekend.
Meanwhile, flooding in the Houston area began to recede Monday after days of heavy rain in Southeast Texas that inundated neighborhoods and prompted hundreds of water rescues.
Source: With information from AP
