People still sorting through the wreckage of their homes after a weekend of deadly weather braced for another wave of strong storms that began rolling into parts of the US Midwest and south on Tuesday evening.
The US National Weather Service began issuing tornado warnings in Iowa and Illinois, and said a confirmed twister was spotted southwest of Chicago near Bryant, Illinois.
The storms were expected to hammer some areas hit by severe weather and possibly dozens of tornadoes just days ago that killed at least 32 people, meaning more misery for those whose homes were destroyed in Arkansas, Iowa and Illinois.
Photo: AP
When a tornado hit Little Rock, Arkansas, on Friday last week, Kimberly Shaw peeked outside to film the storm, then suffered a painful foot injury that required stitches when a glass door behind her shattered and wind nearly sucked her away.
With another storm coming, Shaw said she intends to be far more cautious this time and would rush to an underground shelter at her home.
“The original plan was just: ‘If we see a tornado coming, we’ll get in the shelter,’” Shaw said. “But now it’s like you’re not going to see it coming. You’re not going to hear it coming. You just need to get [inside the shelter] as soon as the warning goes out or if you just feel unsafe.”
Earlier on Tuesday, strong thunderstorms swept through the Quad Cities area of Iowa and Illinois with winds up to 145kph and baseball-size hail. No injuries were reported, but trees were downed and some businesses were damaged in Moline, Illinois.
The weather service and Illinois Emergency Management said a tornado touched down on Tuesday morning in the western Illinois community of Colona. Local news reports showed wind damage to some businesses.
Northern Illinois, from Moline to Chicago, saw 120kph to 128kph winds and hail 5cm to 8cm in diameter, National Weather Service meteorologist Scott Baker said.
The agency received reports of semi-trucks tipped over by winds in Lee County, about 153km west of Chicago.
The storms targeted northern Illinois, eastern Iowa and southwest Wisconsin.
In Keokuk County, Iowa, where 19 homes were destroyed and more were damaged on Friday last week, emergency management official Marissa Reisen worried how those cleaning up the damage would cope if another storm hits.
“All of the people who have been impacted by the storms Friday night are doing all this work, to clean up, to gather their stuff, to pile up the debris,” Reisen said. “If a storm comes through and hits them again and throws all that hard work all over the place again, it will be so deflating to those people.”
Severe storms could produce strong tornadoes and large hail yesterday across eastern Illinois and lower Michigan and in the Ohio Valley, including Indiana and Ohio, the Storm Prediction Center said.
The weather threat extended southwestward across parts of Kentucky, Missouri, Tennessee and Arkansas.
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