Sheriff: 1 dead after tornado hits Wisconsin trailer park
At least one person was killed and around 25 were injured when a tornado hit a mobile home park Tuesday near a small town in western Wisconsin, Barron County Sheriff Chris Fitzgerald said.
The tornado damaged the Prairie Lakes Estates trailer park north of Chetek. The National Weather Service reported a touchdown in the area just after 5:30 p.m.
Helicopter video from WCCO-TV and KARE-TV shows extensive damage at the trailer park, with several homes reduced to rubble.
“It’s a mess,” Fitzgerald told the Leader-Telegram of Eau Claire. “It’s pretty bad. We have at least one deceased so far and we’re still in a search pattern.”
Chetek is about 177 kilometres northeast of Minneapolis/St. Paul, and about 4 km north of Eau Claire.
Chetek Mayor Jeff Martin told KSTPTV that numerous emergency vehicles went to the trailer park. He estimated the park had around 50 homes.
The Wisconsin tornado was part of a huge swath of the Plains and Upper Midwest threatened with severe weather. The area stretches from the Texas Panhandle through Oklahoma, western Kansas, Nebraska and Iowa into Minnesota and Wisconsin.
Another tornado struck a rural area in western Oklahoma, leaving damage in its wake but no immediate reports of injuries.
The storm struck a subdivision about 7:15 p.m. Tuesday just south of Elk City, Oklahoma, about 177 km west of Oklahoma City.
“A lot of tornado damage” has been reported to the subdivision and surrounding rural area, with some homes and outbuildings damaged severely and utility poles and lines downed, said Beckham County Emergency Management Director Lonnie Risenhoover. Cattle have been killed, but Risenhoover said he had no immediate reports of people injured.
Other tornadoes in western Oklahoma and the eastern Texas Panhandle have downed power lines and utility poles, but there were no immediate reports of injuries.
By evening, the National Weather Service listed nearly 20 reports of tornadoes from Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska and Wisconsin, although some of those could be multiple reports of the same tornado.