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Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders activated 100 members of the Arkansas National Guard to help local authorities respond to the damage throughout the state.
In Little Rock, resident Niki Scott took cover in the bathroom after her husband called to say a tornado was headed her way. She could hear glass shattering as the tornado roared past, and emerged afterward to find that her house was one of the few on her street that didn’t have a tree fall on it.
“It’s just like everyone says. It got really quiet, then it got really loud,” Scott said as chainsaws roared and sirens blared in the area.
Outside a Guitar Centre, five people were captured on video aiming their phones at the swirling sky. “Uh, no, that’s an actual tornado, y’all. It’s coming this way,” Red Padilla, a singer and songwriter in the band Red and the Revellers, said in the video.
City council member Lisa Powell Carter said Wynne was without power and roads were full of debris.
“I’m in a panic trying to get home, but we can’t get home,” she said. “Wynne is so demolished. … There’s houses destroyed, trees down on streets.”
Police Chief Richard Dennis told WHBQ-TV that the city suffered “total destruction” and multiple people were trapped.
Multiple tornadoes were reported moving through parts of eastern Iowa, with sporadic damage to buildings.
Nearly 90,000 customers in Arkansas lost power, according to poweroutage.us. About 32,000 were without electricity in neighbouring Oklahoma, where wind gusts of up to 96km/h fuelled fast-moving grass fires. More outages were reported in Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, Tennessee and Texas.
Fire crews were battling several blazes near El Dorado, Kansas, and some residents were asked to evacuate, including about 250 elementary school children who were relocated to a high school.
The National Weather Service’s Storm Prediction Centre had forecast an unusually large outbreak of thunderstorms with the potential to cause hail, damaging wind gusts and strong tornadoes that could move for long distances over the ground.
Such “intense supercell thunderstorms” are only expected to become more common, especially in southern states, as temperatures rise around the world.
Meteorologists said conditions were similar to those a week ago that unleashed the devastating twister that killed at least 21 people and damaged some 2000 homes in Mississippi.
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The hazardous conditions were a result of strong southerly winds transporting copious amounts of moisture from the Gulf of Mexico north, where they will interact with the strengthening storm system.
The weather service is forecasting another batch of intense storms next Tuesday in the same general area as last week. At least the first 10 days of April would be rough, Accuweather meteorologist Brandon Buckingham said earlier this week.
AP
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