A fast-moving storm system that produced at least one tornado in Illinois threatened some 53 million people across 10 midwestern states yesterday, US weather officials said.
“A confirmed large and extremely dangerous tornado” was spotted near Washington, Illinois, located about 145 miles (233km) southwest of Chicago, the National Weather Service said.
Photos taken at the scene showed structures reduced to rubble and houses ripped open in Washington, Illinois.
“There is a lot of debris,” Sara Sparkman, a spokeswoman for the health department of Tazewell County, Illinois, where Washington is located, told The Weather Channel.
“We do know that shelters are being set up in some of the communities because people are being displaced out of their homes because of the storms that hit.”
Ms Sparkman added that the storm had caused damage in Washington and Pekin, south of Peoria.
It came out of a fast-moving storm system that was headed toward Chicago and threatened a large swathe of the midwest with dangerous winds, thunderstorms and hail.
The US weather service warned residents of areas in the path of the storm "you are in a life-threatening situation . . . take cover now."
Seek shelter
At Chicago's Soldier Field, where the NFL's Bears were playing the Baltimore Ravens, officials halted play and told fans to seek shelter due to hazardous weather conditions.
“It does appear that the hardest hit part of the state was down south,” Mike Masters, head of homeland security in Cook County, which includes Chicago, told Chicago’s ABC-7 TV, cautioning that it was still “very, very early”.
The Chicago Department of Aviation, which manages O’Hare International Airport and Midway International Airport, said that as of 1.15pm Central Time (19.15 GMT) flights were grounded a both facilities.
“We obviously have a very dangerous situation on our hands and it’s just getting started,” said Laura Furgione, deputy director of the National Weather Service.
Tornado warnings were in effect for parts of Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri. Weather officials urged residents of areas with tornado warnings in place to take cover in interior, low-floor rooms of study buildings.
The NWS’s Storm Prediction Center said the storm was moving dangerously fast, tracking eastward at 60mph (97 kph).
“These storms will be moving very fast, approximately 60 miles an hour,” said Russell Schneider of the centre. “They will be at your location and on to the next location in a matter of minutes. As a result, people cannot wait for visual confirmation of the threat.”
This storm system has some similarities to the fast-moving derecho that knocked out power to more than 4.2 million people and killed 22 in June 2012, according to Bill Bunting, forecast branch chief at the centre.
“The line of storms today, we believe, when it’s fully mature, will actually be larger than the areas that were affected by the derecho in June of 2012,” he said. “However, this will also be accompanied by a worse tornado threat in the areas that we’ve highlighted and large hail in Illinois and Wisconsin.”