Tornadoes

A slow-moving storm packing tornadoes and hail battered rural Oklahoma, tearing up trees and destroying three barns at a hog farm near Lacey in Kingfisher County, northwest of Oklahoma City. No injuries were reported at the farm. Most of its 3,900 pigs, housed in crates, were also unhurt.

JOPLIN, Mo. - Arielle Speer started to cry. She was having a panic attack, and the movie hadn't even started. Speer is a Joplin tornado survivor, and she had come to remember. Almost a year ago, the 28-year-old was standing on the side of Connecticut Avenue looking at the pile of rubble that used to be her apartment building. It had since been cleared away, and now Speer was sitting in a local university auditorium, waiting to watch a documentary about the storm that destroyed it. A lot has happened since May 22, 2011, when a massive tornado erased nearly a third of Joplin and killed about 160 people.

Severe weather moving through much of the nation produced tornadoes in the South that injured about 30 people. Parts of the Midwest experienced freezing rain, snow and flooding. A tornado damaged or destroyed about 200 homes and businesses in Prattville, outside Montgomery. Freezing rain and snow fell across southern Wisconsin, still weary from a snowstorm that snarled travel for days.

Chancy Smith, who is in charge of his county's emergency response unit, had never seen anything like it. A "funeral procession" of cars trekked through county roads as a tornado bore down on Solomon, Kan., Smith said. Gawkers clogged the streets. Photographers stood in the middle of highways with tripods. Some vehicles drove over downed power lines. Like some kind of paparazzi, obsessed with storms instead of stars, the chasers converged in tornado alley last weekend to capture images and perhaps profits from a deadly twister outbreak that scoured the Central Plains.

Late spring was anything but mild in the southwestern plains as the area was pounded by tornadoes, thunderstorms, flooding and golf-ball-size hail. A tornado swept through a truck stop in Clinton, Ark., leveling the Country Kitchen restaurant. Six people were treated at a Clinton hospital. Twisters touched down near Pandora, Langtry and San Antonio, Tex., damaging several buildings and a mobile home. Winds threw a storage shed 100 yards, while a tree snapped in San Antonio and fell on a home.

Smoke rose from burning heaps of wreckage Saturday as residents of rural Arkansas cleaned up what was left of their homes after deadly tornadoes scoured a state that has been plagued by severe weather this year. All that remained of Shelia Massey's home were a chimney, a bathroom wall and a bathtub that was her storm shelter. "God's hand came down and held us there while the rest of the house just blew away," said Massey, 54. "That's all there was to it. The Lord held us there." The storms killed seven people in Arkansas, authorities said Saturday, revising a toll of eight reported the night before.

Wind-driven rain and more tornadoes lashed North Carolina on Saturday as stunned residents throughout the Southeast picked up the pieces from an earlier storm that left at least 21 people dead and hundreds homeless. One child was seriously injured when a tornado touched down in Rockingham County, N.C., but for the most part the latest storms did not measure up to the intensity of those the day before. Seventy-five thousand customers of Duke Power Co. remained without power, and company officials said it might be Monday before service was restored.

The scope of devastation left by the second-deadliest tornado blast in U.S. history continued to emerge Saturday as stunned survivors combed the wreckage of homes churned into matchsticks and aid workers and volunteers struggled to get food, water and generators to thousands displaced across seven Southern states. Hundreds who spent the night in emergency shelters hastily erected in hardest-hit Tuscaloosa, Ala., scoured the remnants of their homes and businesses for photos and keepsakes, mostly in vain.

Tornadoes tore through the Dallas-Fort Worth area known as the Metroplex on Tuesday, and although no serious injuries had been reported by mid-afternoon, officials are seeing major damage in their wake.  Lt. Darrel Whitfield of the Arlington Fire Department told The Times that a tornado struck at about 1:15 p.m. in Fort Worth and headed 15 miles east into neighboring Arlington, home of the Texas Rangers baseball team. "We have heavy damage in south Arlington, no reports of injuries, several fires, lightning strikes," Whitfield said.

A waterspout off Sulu Island sent torrents of water cascading onto houses south of the provincial capital of Jolo, killing at least two people, the military said Monday. Nearly 100 families lost their homes in the storm Sunday night in Jolo, about 600 miles south of Manila.

The toll from the slashing tornadoes that tore through the Midwest over the weekend rose to six dead and 29 injured, officials said Monday. Cleanup efforts were already underway. The hardest-hit area was in Woodward, Okla., a city of about 12,000, where a sheriff's office spokeswoman said the toll stood at six dead. The latest fatality was a man who died in a Texas hospital where he was being treated for injuries sustained in Woodward. The Woodward storm was one of dozens of tornadoes attributed to a system that rolled through 10 states over the weekend.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Everybody knew punishing twisters were about to pummel the Midwest. The National Weather Service had issued a warning a day in advance about a "high-end, life-threatening event" across the Great Plains. But when the predictions came to pass late Saturday and early Sunday, some towns received little or no warning. In the worst-hit community, Woodward, Okla., emergency sirens apparently were silenced by lightening and a tornado. Five people died. And in Creston, Iowa, sirens reportedly failed to sound, but officials didn't know why. The only reported fatalities from the spate of twisters were in Woodward, where more than two dozen other people were injured, officials said.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Dozens of tornadoes raked the Central Plains on Saturday as residents in Kansas, Oklahoma, Nebraska and Iowa braced themselves for a long night of tornado-watching. Damage was relatively light in the afternoon as the storm scraped across the sparsely populated farmlands of western and central Kansas. A hospital was damaged in Creston, Iowa, with no injuries reported. But well after sundown, much of the region was still under tornado watches. If anything, the potential for disaster increased as the system headed toward more densely populated areas in eastern Kansas and southeastern Nebraska.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- It's like Russian roulette for Midwesterners: There's a storm coming, so you stick your head out the back door to get a gander at it. Most of the time there's no danger, which is why so many people do it. But it's a habit weather officials are trying to stop. As a highly volatile system moves into the lower Midwest - with "likely" tornado-producing storms expected to barrel through Kansas and Oklahoma and then Nebraska later Saturday evening - the National Weather Service could be looking at the first true test of its new, stronger-worded warning system intended to send Midwesterners to their basements a little sooner.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- As predicted, storms marching eastward through northwestern Oklahoma, central Kansas and southern Nebraska have unleashed a string of tornadoes. But so far, only light damage has been reported. By 2:40 p.m. Pacific time Saturday, the National Weather Service had counted 17 tornadoes spotted across sparsely populated areas in the Central Plains -- largely on a diagonal line running southwest to northeast between Woodward, Okla., and Thayer, Neb. The weather service issued tornado warnings for McPherson and Logan counties in west-central Nebraska.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- A tornado hit Wichita on Saturday night as a series of storms tore through central Kansas. The number of injuries and the extent of the damage could not be immediately confirmed, but local media reported that a trailer park had been hit by the tornado. "Total destruction at trailer park south off 47th and Clifton," Wichita Eagle photographer Travis Heying (@travisheying) tweeted around 11 p.m., saying that he could hear voices in the rubble. He later tweeted photos at the Pinaire Mobile Home Park showing survivors walking through heavy damage, with one photo showing a man digging through the rubble: "This man shouted, 'Quiet!

As clean-up from deadly tornadoes in the Midwest and South continued Thursday, a second storm system that could generate more twisters in the same hard-hit areas is predicted to hit overnight.  According to the latest projections by the National Weather Service, more storms are expected to move into the region, including southern Illinois, beginning after midnight Thursday and continuing through Friday. The severe storms will bring rain and hail and the weather service warned of chances of more tornadoes.

The tornado that destroyed Michelle Arena's home here last January chased the family for months in their nightmares. When a big storm came their way a month later, the panic-stricken mom packed her three children into the car and tried to outrun it. Her 8-year-old son Jacob endured vomiting spells over six months. And 9-year-old Catie relived the disaster for weeks in her dreams. "We were so spooked," said Arena, 36, who huddled with the children in a basement storage room while the Jan.

A tornado touched down in Norman, Okla., Friday afternoon, blowing out windows at the town's high school and knocking down power lines, as the area braced for severe weather over the next two days.  Reports of structural damage were received less than an hour after the tornado touched down at 4 p.m. Central, said meteorologist Rick Smith with the National Weather Service. Emergency management teams were responding, though none of the damage was listed as serious, Smith told The Times.

The Texas tornadoes that smacked the Dallas area on Tuesday were still playing havoc with air traffic on Wednesday, not just in Dallas but across the country. Dallas is a hub for American Airlines , one of the nation's largest carriers. Orbitz Flight Tracker on Wednesday showed arrival and departure delays of as much as 44 minutes from Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport ( DFW ). Joe Brancatelli, who writes the JoeSentMe.com newsletter for travelers, said American Airlines and American Eagle will cancel about a quarter of their flights -- about 420 so far on Wednesday.