Cleanup efforts continued Friday after severe storms — including some that produced tornadoes — tore across a swath of Southern states, killing at least five people as they destroyed hundreds of homes, tossed vehicles into buildings and left hundreds of thousands without electricity.
In Perryton, Texas, Ochiltree County sheriff Terry Bouchard said three people were killed when the tornado struck Thursday afternoon.
Another person died Thursday night in the Florida Panhandle when at least one confirmed tornado cut through Escambia County, toppling a tree onto a home, county spokesperson Andie Gibson told the Pensacola News Journal.
Also, a Mississippi man died after a tree fell on him during stormy weather early Friday. Canton Police Chief Otha Brown told WLBT-TV the man was killed after high winds toppled over a tree onto his carport as he was entering his car.
Of the homes searched so far in Perryton, all but one of the occupants had been accounted for, so the main priority was going back over the area and the debris field to find that person, Perryton fire chief Paul Dutcher said on NBC’s Today show.
Dutcher estimated that 150 to 200 homes in the community had been destroyed and said that in the downtown area, many storefronts were totally wiped out and buildings had collapsed or partially collapsed.
Local hospital using generator power
Sheriff Bouchard urged residents to remain at home if possible as cleanup efforts began in the town of more than 8,000 about 185 kilometres northeast of Amarillo, just south of the Oklahoma line. The National Weather Service in Amarillo confirmed that a tornado hit the area shortly after 5 p.m. Thursday.
Perryton’s downtown was walloped. About two blocks of businesses were heavily damaged, including an office supply store, a floral shop and a hair salon along the town’s Main Street. A minivan was shoved into the outer wall of a theatre.
Ochiltree General Hospital treated 115 patients due to Thursday’s tornado in Perryton, according to a Facebook post.
Patients had minor to major trauma, ranging from “head injuries to collapsed lungs, lacerations, broken bones,” said Kelly Judice, the hospital’s interim CEO.
The hospital is operating on a generator and some patients were being treated in a bright conference room since exam rooms in one clinic don’t have windows, Judice said.
Widespread power outages
Storm chaser Brian Emfinger told Fox Weather that he watched the twister move through a mobile home park, mangling trailers and uprooting trees.
“I had seen the tornado do some pretty serious destruction to the industrial part of town,” he said. “Unfortunately, just west of there, there is just mobile home, after mobile home, after mobile home that is completely destroyed.”
There was no immediate word on the tornado’s size or wind speeds, meteorologist Luigi Meccariello said.
The storm system then moved into Oklahoma, spawning several more suspected twisters in addition to high winds and large hail.
Observations program leader Forrest Mitchell at the National Weather Service office in Norman, Okla., said survey crews were expected to head out Friday to southwest and west central Oklahoma and western North Texas to investigate possible tornadoes.
Nearly 590,000 customers were without electricity in Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Oklahoma Friday morning, according to the poweroutage.us website.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said Thursday he had directed the state Division of Emergency Management to help with everything from traffic control to restoring water and other utilities, if needed.
It was the second consecutive day that powerful storms struck the U.S. and comes as spring nears its end, not a typical time of year for tornadic activity, but not rare, according to meteorologist Matt Mosier at the Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Okla.
“You expect thunderstorms this time of year,” Mosier said. “It’s definitely not rare, but tornadoes are not on a lot of people’s minds because they’ve just kind of moved away from the season that they’re typically focused on [tornadoes].”
This week has been very warm with moist, unstable conditions that combined with strong wind shear, which is abnormal for this time of year, Mosier said.
Meanwhile, flash flooding was reported in Pensacola, Fla., where between 30 and 40 centimetres inches of rain has fallen since Thursday evening, said Caitlin Baldwin, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service’s Mobile in Pensacola, Fla.
In West Pensacola, flash floodwaters surrounded an apartment complex that was evacuated of all its 146 residents.
Boats were used to remove some and take them to a local community centre, said Davis Wood, public information officer for Escambia County Public Safety. No injuries were reported in that evacuation.
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