4 killed as storm system sweeps across South
In Arkansas, a tree topples onto house, killing awoman.
A storm system forecasters called “particularly dangerous” killed four people as it swept across the countryWednesday.
Tornadoes touched down in Indiana and Mississippi, where three were killed.
A tree blew over onto a house in Arkansas, killing an 18-year-old woman and trapping a 1-yearold child inside, authorities said. Rescuers pulled the toddler safely from the home.
Authorities in Mississippi did not have details of those dead after multiple tornadoes hit the state.
In Benton County, where one death occurred, search-and-rescue crews were doing a house-by-house search to make sure residents were accounted for.
A tornado damaged or destroyed at least 20 homes in the northwest part of the state. Clarksdale Mayor Bill Luckett said the only confirmed casualty was a dog killed by storm debris. Planes at a small airport overturned and an unknown number of people were injured.
“I’m looking at some horrific damage right now,” Luckett said. “Sheet metal is wrapped around trees. there are overturned airplanes. A building is just destroyed.”
Television images showed the tornado appeared to be on the ground for more than 10 minutes. Interstate 55 was closed in both directions as the tornado approached, the Mississippi Highway Patrol said.
After an EF-1 tornado struck the south Indianapolis suburb of Greenwood, television stations showed pictures of damage including a portion of a roof blown off a veterinary office.
The biggest threat for tornadoes was in a region of 3.7 million people in Mississippi, Tennessee and Arkansas and parts of Missouri, Illinois and Kentucky, according to the national Storm Prediction Center in Oklahoma. The center issued a “particularly dangerous situation” alert for the first time since June 2014, when two massive EF4 twisters devastated a rural Nebraska town, killing two people.
About 120 miles east of where the tornado touched down, Brandi Holland, a convenience store clerk in Tupelo, Miss., said people were reminded of a tornado that damaged or destroyed more than 2,000 homes and businesses in April 2014.
“They’re opening all our tornado shelters because they say there’s an 80 percent chance of a tornado today,” Holland said.
The threat of severe weather just before Christmas is unusual, but not unprecedented, said Greg Carbin, a meteorologist at the national Storm Prediction Center.
Twisters hit southeast Mississippi exactly a year ago, killing five people and injuring dozens of others. On Christmas Day in 2012, a storm system spawned several tornadoes, damaging homes from Texas to Alabama.
In Arkansas, Pope County Sheriff Shane Jones said the 18-year-old woman was killed when a tree crashed into her bedroom. The woman and her 1 ½-year-old sister were sleeping in a bedroom of the house near Atkins about 65 miles northwest of Little Rock, when winds uprooted the tree that crashed through the roof.
“It’s terrible that this happened, especially at Christmas,” Jones said.