Tornadoes, heavy rain rip across central and southern US
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The US' National Weather Service said there were at least 15 reports of tornadoes in at least four states late on April 2.
PHOTO: REUTERS
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WASHINGTON - Tornadoes ripped across a wide swathe of central and southern United States on April 2, destroying homes and businesses and bringing down power lines and trees.
The National Weather Service (NWS) said there were at least 15 reports of tornadoes in at least four states late on April 2.
Eight people were injured across Kentucky and Arkansas, including one critically injured in Kentucky’s Ballard County, local officials said.
Late on April 2, Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders declared a state of emergency across the state due to the storms, which also brought hail and torrential rain.
NWS said millions of people were under alerts for tornadoes and flash floods, and that the dangers would continue into the early hours on April 3.
Violent storms are forecast to ravage the country for several days, NWS said, with April 2 just “the beginning of a multi-day catastrophic and potentially historic heavy rainfall event”.
NWS meteorologist Scott Kleebauer said: “The word for tonight is ‘chaotic’. This is a large expanse of storms migrating slowly to the east, stretching from south-east Michigan down into south-eastern Arkansas.”
The town of Nevada, Missouri, was hit by a tornado.
Writing on social media, the state’s Emergency Management Agency said it caused “major damage to several businesses, power poles were snapped, and several (empty) train cars were flipped onto their sides by the powerful storm”.
NWS issued tornado and flash flood warnings for parts of Missouri, Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi, Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky and Oklahoma.
It called the rain threats for Arkansas, Missouri, Tennessee and Mississippi in the coming days a “generational flood event”, with some locations forecast to see as much as 38.1cm of rain by the weekend, which could cause rivers to burst their banks and cause “catastrophic river flooding”.
More than 400,000 customers had their power knocked out across the storm-hit area, according to PowerOutage.us. REUTERS
