Widespread severe storms leave 1 dead
Thousands of homes and businesses were without power Tuesday as severe weather roared through several states, causing at least one death and spawning possible tornadoes.
In West Virginia, about 140,000 customers were without electricity Tuesday afternoon, or about 14% of all customers tracked in the state by poweroutage.us.
Northeastern Oklahoma was hit with a strong weather system containing heavy rains that produced three suspected tornadoes. The storms were blamed for the death of a 46-year-old homeless woman in Tulsa who died inside a drainage pipe, police said.
Tulsa Fire Department spokesperson Andy Little said the woman's boyfriend told authorities the two had gone to sleep at the entrance of the drainage pipe and were awakened by the floodwaters. Up to 1.5 inches of rain fell in Tulsa in about one hour, National Weather Service meteorologist Robert Darby said.
“It wasn't a whole lot. But when it came down it was pretty rapid,” Darby said.
In Ohio, firefighters rescued two people who were trapped under a bridge Tuesday when a river began rising. The two people were sleeping around 8:45 a.m. when the Scioto River started to rise, the Columbus Fire Department reported. While the pair were never directly in the water, the flooding prevented them from returning to the shore, so a fire department boat was sent to rescue them. No injuries were reported.
In southern Ohio, Mindy Broughton, 49, rushed into her mobile home Tuesday morning as hail began and winds picked up at the RV Park where she has lives near Hanging Rock.
Broughton and her fiance hunkered down as the mobile home quickly began rocking. Broughton said her fiance used his body to shield her as the winds raged outside.
“I said I think we may die today,” she said.
In a matter of seconds, the winds died down. When Broughton opened her mobile home door, she saw the RV Park littered with debris and overturned RVs. Luckily, Broughton said there was no one inside the overturned mobile homes that could be seen in her Facebook Live video.
Severe storms also swept through far southwestern Indiana on Tuesday morning, toppling trees and causing power outages, leading several local school districts to cancel the day's classes. More than 18,000 homes and businesses were without power shortly before noon Tuesday, including in Vanderburgh County, home to Evansville, Indiana's third-largest city.
Residents in Wisconsin were experiencing a spring snowstorm Tuesday afternoon that forecasters warned could dump more than a foot of snow in eastern parts of the state, including the Green Bay area. The state's top election official, Meagan Wolfe, urged residents planning to vote in Tuesday's presidential primaries to consider voting earlier in the day to avoid travel woes.
In West Virginia, a storm blew off part of a vacant building's roof in Charleston, littering the street with bricks and closing the roadway to traffic Tuesday afternoon. Trees were dislodged from the earth by the roots and lay in roads, lawns and in some cases, on top of cars.
The National Weather Service confirmed a tornado in northeast Tennessee Tuesday. A funeral home and a house were damaged in the town of Sunbright, a town of about 500 people, Matthew Brown, Morgan County's 911 director, told The Associated Press. Power lines and trees were down, and some roads were closed, he said.
Radar showed the tornado touched down about 5:20 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time in Sunbright, Derek Eisentrout, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Morristown, Tennessee, said.