A tornado destroyed homes and downed trees and power lines as it tore through a small town in northeastern Oklahoma, one of the several tornadoes that ripped through the central United States in the midst of a series of powerful storms.
The tornado ripped through the town of 1,000 people in Barnsdall, about a 40-minute drive north of Tulsa, Monday night. The nearby city of Bartlesville also took a “direct hit” from a funnel, according to Washington County Emergency Manager Kary Cox..
CBS Tulsa affiliate KOTV meteorologist Stephen Nehrenz said on social media Monday, “The Hampton Inn in Bartlesville was hit by tonight's tornado. Reports say they lost most of the roof of the building. So far it seems like most everyone is there from what we've heard initially.”
Law enforcement officers and residents surveyed the damage in a Barnsdall neighborhood when lightning and heavy rain struck, local television footage showed. The tornado had ripped the roof off a house before spitting it back out into the street. Osage County Sheriff Eddie Virden told KOTV there were no confirmed deaths as of 11 p.m. local time.
The station said it cited Osage County Emergency Management as saying there were confirmed reports of numerous injuries and widespread damage. OCEM said many people were believed to be trapped in their homes and that downed power lines and concerns about possible gas leaks were hampering the response. Municipal authorities are working to clear the roads.
Search and rescue efforts were underway on the Osage Nation reservation, authorities said.
About 28,000 homes and businesses were in the dark in Oklahoma as of 3:30 a.m. local time.
The National Weather Service in Tulsa had warned earlier in the evening that “a large and potentially deadly tornado” was headed toward Barnsdall, with wind gusts up to 70 mph. Meteorologist Brad McGavock said information on the size of the tornado and how far it traveled was not immediately available Monday night.
The storms began early Monday with strong winds and rain. But in the dark, tornadoes were seen circling northern Oklahoma. At one point in the evening, a storm in the small town of Covington had “produced tornadoes for more than an hour,” the National Weather Service said. Across the area, wind turbines spun rapidly in the blinding wind and rain.
In Kansas, some areas were hit by apple-sized hail up to 3 inches in diameter.
Storms ravaged Oklahoma while areas like Sulfur and Holdenville were still recovering from one tornado that killed four people and left thousands without power late last month. Both the Plains and the Midwest have been hit by tornadoes this spring.
The Oklahoma State Emergency Operations Center, which coordinates the storm response from a bunker near the state capital of Oklahoma City, was still activated since the deadly storms on last weekend
The weather service said more than 3.4 million people, 1,614 schools and 159 hospitals in Oklahoma, parts of southern Kansas and far north Texas faced the most severe tornado threat Monday.
Monte Tucker, a farmer and rancher from the western Oklahoma town of Sweetwater, had spent Monday putting some of his tractors and heavy equipment into barns to protect them from hail. He said he let his neighbors know they could come to his house if the weather turned dangerous.
“We built a house 10 years ago, and my stubborn wife put her foot down and made sure we built a safe room,” Tucker said. He said that the entire hall on the ground floor is built with reinforced concrete walls.
Oklahoma and Kansas were under a high risk weather warning Monday.
Bill Bunting, deputy director of the Storm Prediction Center, said such a warning from the center is not seen every day or every spring.
“It's the highest threat level we can assign,” he said.
It was last published on March 31, 2023, when a massive storm system tore through parts of the South and Midwest, including Arkansas, Illinois and rural Indiana.
The increased risk is due to an unusual confluence: Winds reaching about 75 mph blasted across Colorado's populated Front Range region, including the Denver area, on Monday.
The winds were being created by a low-pressure system in northern Colorado that was also picking up moisture from the Gulf of Mexico, fueling the risk of severe weather across the Plains, according to the National Weather Service's Denver area office.
Colorado was not at risk for tornadoes or thunderstorms.
All week looks stormy in the U.S. The eastern and southern United States are expected to bear the brunt of the bad weather for the rest of the week, including Indianapolis, Memphis, Nashville, St. Louis and Cincinnati, cities where there are more than 21 million people live. It should be clear over the weekend.
In the meantime, flooding in the Houston area began receding Monday after days of heavy rain in southeast Texas left neighborhoods flooded and prompted hundreds of high-water rescues.
