Forecasters warn of another wave of storms.
MADILL, Okla. — Severe weather blew through the South on Thursday after killing at least seven people in Oklahoma, Texas and Louisiana, including a worker at a factory hit by an apparent tornado, a man whose car was blown off the road and a man who went outside to grab a trash can and was swept away in a flood.
More than 150,000 businesses and homes from Texas to Georgia were without power as the severe weather blew eastward, snapping utility lines as trees fell, according to poweroutage.us, which tracks utility reports.
Winds peeled roofing material off a church in Alabama and sent an awning crashing onto a car at a gas station. In Adel, Ga., pieces of metal flew off a building during a possible twister.
Forecasters said additional damage was possible from another wave of storms.
Earlier, an apparent tornado killed three people and injured 20 to 30 more in and around the southeast Texas town of Onalaska.
Nine suspected tornadoes touched down in southern Oklahoma, National Weather Service meteorologist Alex Zwink said. One of them caused widespread damage across the town of Madill, near the Red River, said Donny Raley, the city’s emergency manager.
Just outside town, workers were leaving for the day from J&I Manufacturing, which makes trailers, when a suspected twister hit. The body of a worker was later found about a fourth of a mile away, Marshall County Emergency Management Director Robert Chaney said.
A second person died in Madill when the tornado blew his vehicle off a highway: The body of Chad L. Weyant, 46, of Madill was found in the median and his vehicle in a nearby field, according to an Oklahoma Highway Patrol report.
A Louisiana man was later found dead after a witness saw him try to retrieve a trash can from water near a drainage ditch; he lost his footing and was swept away by floodwaters, DeSoto Parish Sheriff Jayson Richardson told the Shreveport Times.
“There was some pretty extreme flooding here in Mansfield. Water like I’ve not seen in many, many years, if ever,” the sheriff told the newspaper. “Basically the water rose really fast and we had to rescue some people out of homes. I think we had about 20 or so homes that people were flooded in.”
News outlets reported that Becky Carter Roberts, 67, was killed during a storm in Lecompte, La., 15 miles south of Alexandria, but the Rapides Parish Sheriff’s Office didn’t immediately say how she died.
National Weather Service teams will check damage and confirm whether the storms were tornadoes after the threat passes.