After tornadoes torn through the South and Midwest,Communities are shown to have been destroyed

Multiple tornadoes and storms ripped through McNairy County, Tennessee, and Belvidere, Illinois, during a heavy metal concert

Communities ravaged by tornadoes and ferocious storms were picking up the pieces on Sunday as the death toll from the storms climbed to at least 22.

More than 40 people were injured and dozens of others were left homeless when tornadoes ripped roofs off buildings and knocked out power in several states.

In Belvidere, Illinois, part of the roof of the Apollo Theatre collapsed as about 260 people were attending a heavy metal concert. A man was pulled out of the rubble.

At least seven people died after two back-to-back lines of storms hit McNairy County, Tennessee, where authorities were searching through collapsed buildings Saturday evening.

The sheriff of the county said that they had deaths on both sides of the county.

In all, at least 29 dead were found, which included nine in one Tennessee County, four in the small town of Wynne, Arkansas, and three in Sullivan, Indiana.

The governors in Indiana, Iowa, Illinois, and Arkansas all made emergency or disaster declarations to give them more time to help their affected counties.

Shocks and destruction in Little Rock, Tenn., during its first day of rebuilding after being blown out by a high school

Little Rock had heavy damage but no deaths as of Saturday afternoon. Efforts are now focused on recovery and rebuilding, Mayor Frank Scott Jr. said.

“I don’t know how to put it into words. It was a huge blow. It’s different seeing it firsthand than it is watching it on TV.

Hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses were also without power across the South and Northeast, including 134,000 in Pennsylvania and nearly 86,000 in Ohio, according to poweroutage.us.

Residents of Wynne, a community of about 8,000 people 50 miles (80 kilometers) west of Memphis, Tennessee, woke Saturday to find the high school’s roof shredded and its windows blown out. There were huge trees on the ground. Broken walls, windows and roofs pocked homes and businesses.

Some houses in the home to about 8,000 people were completely destroyed while others had their roofs torn off and the interiors of others were covered with storm debris, drone footage provided to CNN shows.

“We made her and the kids get into the bathtub because that’s supposed to be the safest place. And we just all hunkered down because all the doors blew out. There are double doors in the front and back of the building. It all blew out at once,” Pieterick said.

State Police Suggests that Storms from Sunday night would be a Total Death toll in a Tennessean State. The case of a House in Bridgeville, Delaware

“Had they not, looking at the devastation that we had, our death toll could have been in the hundreds,” Buck said. “The power of mother nature is something not to be underestimated,” he added.

Earlier storms tore a path through the Arkansas capital, collapsing the roof of a packed concert venue in Illinois and stunning people throughout the region Saturday with the damage’s scope.

The White House announced Sunday that it would provide federal resources, including financial assistance, to support recovery efforts after President Joe Biden issued a major disaster declaration.

The president’s home state of New Jersey and Delaware were subject to tornadoes on Sunday, prompting warnings across a widening area. There were a lot of homes damaged and roads closed in southern Delaware.

One person was found dead inside a house heavily damaged by the storm Saturday night in Bridgeville, Sussex County, Delaware State Police reported. However, the exact cause of death was not immediately known.

Debris lay scattered inside the shells of homes and on lawns: clothing, insulation, toys, splintered furniture, a pickup truck with its windows shattered.

As a tornado bore down on them, Macmillan and her husband huddled with their dogs in a small bathroom and said goodbye to each other. Their home was damaged by a falling tree, but they were not hurt.

The governor went to the county Saturday to check out the damage. He said the storm was the worst of his time as governor, coming days after a shooting at a school in Nashville that killed six people and a funeral he and his wife attended.

“It’s terrible what has happened in this community, this county, this state,” Lee said. Your community seems to have done what Tennessean communities do and that is rally and respond.

Jeffrey Day said he called his daughter after he heard that Adamsville was being hit. She was in a closet with her son when the storm hit.

After the storm passed, his daughter crawled out of her destroyed home and over barbed wire and drove to nearby family. On Saturday evening, baby clothes were still strewn about the site.

Christopher Williams, a spokesman for the Memphis police, said in an email that there are three deaths believed to be weather-related, and two of them are children.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/04/02/1167650510/tornado-damage-south-midwest

A tornado that struck south of the Crawford County, Illinois, house of Masoud Shahed-Ghaznavi, said it killed three people and injured eight

“I told him that it was going to be okay, I held his hand and sat with him,” she said. I didn’t really know much else what to do,” concertgoer Gabrielle Lewellyn told WTVO-TV.

The Apollo’s crews cleaned up with the help of Forklifts on Saturday. Business owners picked up shattered windows.

In Crawford County, Illinois, three people were killed and eight injured when a tornado hit around New Hebron, said Bill Burke, the county board chair.

“We’ve had emergency crews digging people out of their basements because the house is collapsed on top of them, but luckily they had that safe space to go to,” Rutan said at a news conference.

At a news conference, the mayor said that the area south of the county seat of 4,000 is “untreadable” and several people were rescued overnight. He said that there were as many as 12 people injured.

The National Weather Service said the tornado had wind speeds of up to 165 miles per hour and was on the ground for 25 miles.

Masoud Shahed-Ghaznavi was lunching at home when it roared through his neighborhood, causing him to hide in the laundry room as sheetrock fell and windows shattered. The house was mostly rubble when he came back.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/04/02/1167650510/tornado-damage-south-midwest

The Little Rock tornado that ripped through the US Post Office Building and burned down homes in Arkansas and New Jersey: the most recent tornadoes

It could take days to figure out the exact number of tornadoes from the most recent event, said Bill Bunting, chief of forecast operations at the Storm Prediction Center. There were also hundreds of reports of large hail and damaging winds, he said.

The wide storm system brought a lot of fires to the southern Plains. There are said to be at least 32 people injured and 40 homes that have been destroyed.

There are unconfirmed reports of another tornado in New Jersey, where a funnel cloud was spotted in the video footage and heavy tree damage was reported.

The mayor of Wynne, Arkansas says it will take more than its own resources to clean up after the tornado.

Next door, Tennessee reported the highest death toll with 15 weather-related fatalities confirmed over the weekend, including 9 deaths in a single county, McNairy County.

President Joe Biden declared a major disaster for Arkansas in order to allow for FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell’s visit to assess the damage.

The city of Little Rock, Arkansas, home to 2,900 structures, was impacted by an EF3 tornado that caused an estimated peak winds of 165 mph.

We have rallied as a city to recover and begin to rebuild after the tornadoes, thanks to all the people that helped, the Little Rock mayor said.

Teresa Blankenship’s property took a direct hit, with the tornado tearing her home apart and flipping over her brand-new car, CNN affiliate WHBQ reported.

More than 200 miles away, an EF-2 tornado also tore through the Readyville, Tennessee, area early Saturday morning, ripping the roof off the US Post Office building and destroying the historic Readyville Mill, as well as numerous homes along one street, Rutherford County Government said in a news release.

Glass-Shattering in Whiteland, Mississippi, a severe weather outbreak predicted for the MS, Mississippi Valley, and Midwest by the National Weather Service

In Whiteland, residents spent hours trying to save what they could from the destroyed homes. They were searching for wedding dresses, high school diplomas, keys, and other items.

One resident of the destroyed home told CNN that they are trying to get through the damaged rooms and find what can be extricated from the collapsed walls. “By looking at it, they’re lucky they made it out alive.”

We heard a train whistle. It was very loud. We had to hold our ears in our hands because of the pressure on them. Everybody was running to the basement and we got down there, I heard glass shattering,” one Sullivan resident told WTHR. “When we came back up everything was just gone.”

There is only a marginal risk of severe thunderstorms across parts of the Central Gulf Coast states, Southern Plains and Mississippi Valley and Midwest Monday, according to the National Weather Service.

There will be a severe weather outbreak on Tuesday in the Mississippi Valley, along with the Ohio and Tennessee Valleys, which are still reeling from recent storms.