At least 21 people were killed and dozens of others injured after a powerful storm system ripped through the South and Midwest, spawning tornadoes that devastated homes and shopping centers in Arkansas, Kentucky, and Tennessee, tore through rural Indiana, and collapsed a theater roof during a heavy metal concert in Illinois.
Dozens of confirmed or suspected tornadoes ripped through at least eight states Friday into Saturday, leaving many residents trapped in their homes with the threat of more severe weather still looming.
The dead included seven in McNairy County in Tennessee and four in the town of Wynne, Arkansas.
“The damage and loss that our community suffered last night was catastrophic,” the Adamsville Police Department – which covers part of McNairy – told Action News 5.
Hospital officials in Wynne said at least 28 people were injured in the tiny community of 8,000 where residents woke Saturday to find the high school’s roof shredded and its windows blown out.
Wynne City Councilmember Lisa Powell Carter said the town was also without power and its roads flooded with debris.
“Wynne is so demolished,” she said. “There’s houses destroyed, trees down on streets.”
“I’m sad that my town has been hit so hard,” added Heidi Jenkins, a salon owner. “Our school is gone, my church is gone. I’m sad for all the people who lost their homes.”
Other deaths included four in Illinois and three in nearby Sullivan, Indiana. There were also deaths reported in Alabama and Mississippi, along with one near Little Rock, Arkansas.
Little Rock Mayor Frank Scott said that 2,100 homes and businesses were in the tornado’s path, but that no assessment had been done on how many were damaged.
The National Weather Service said the tornado that swept through Lincoln County, Tennessee, was a high-end EF3 twister with wind speeds up to 165 mph and a path as long as 25 miles.
In Belvidere, Illinois, another twister collapsed the roof of the historic Apollo Theater about an hour into a 7 p.m. show slated to feature the metal bands Morbid Angel, Revocation, and Skeletal Remains.
At least one person was killed and 28 hurt — five of them severely. The National Weather Service’s Chicago office confirmed that an EF-1 tornado moved through the area.
Belvidere Fire Department Chief Shawn Schadle said 260 people were at the venue during the collapse.
First responders also rescued someone from an elevator and had to grapple with downed power lines outside the theater, he said.
Belvidere Police Chief Shane Woody described the scene as “chaos, absolute chaos.”
One of the patrons, Gabrielle Lewellyn, said she picked the worst time to enter the theater.
“I was there within a minute before it came down,” she told WTVO-TV. “The winds, when I was walking up to the building, it went like from zero to a thousand within five seconds.”
High winds continued in several states Saturday, hampering recovery efforts and knocking out power for tends of thousands.
Wind gusts in Ohio neared 55 mph, leaving more than 55,000 homes and businesses in the Columbus area in the dark, WBNS reported.
More than 225,000 were without power statewide by late Saturday.
The heavy winds also took out power to more than 267,000 homes and businesses in neighboring Pennsylvania and nearly 70,000 in West Virginia.
They also left about 39,000 in upstate New York with the lights off as the storms moved to the Northeast.
That was in addition to nearly 35,000 homes and businesses still without electricity in Indiana late Saturday, 35,000 in Arkansas, 24,000 in Illinois, 87,000 in Tennessee, and 48,000 in Kentucky, while many other power outages were reported in adjacent states, according to outage tracker PowerOutage.us.
There were other confirmed twisters in Iowa and wind-whipped grass fires blazed in Oklahoma, as the storm system threatened a broad swath of the country home to some 85 million people.
In Minnesota and Wisconsin, the storm system dumped about 8.5 inches of snow, leaving nearly 80,000 without power in the two states.
The destructive weather came as President Joe Biden toured the aftermath of a deadly tornado that socked Mississippi one week ago and vowed the government would help the area recover.
With Post wires.
