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At least two people were killed in a storm Wednesday night that caused several tornadoes in and around the Oklahoma City metropolitan area, officials said.
McClain County Deputy Sheriff Scott Gibbons said in an overnight call that the two deaths were recorded in or near Cole, a town of about 600 people south of the city. He said the storm had cut through a damage path several miles wide and about 10 miles long, and likely destroyed a “significant number” of homes.
There were injuries elsewhere in the county, but Gibbons added that the number of injuries is not yet known.
A survey team planned to investigate damage from several reported tornadoes that made landfall around Oklahoma City on Wednesday, including one that was recorded for several minutes within city limits, National Ryan Burns, a meteorologist at the Bureau of Meteorology. The strongest was recorded in the call and lasted nearly half an hour, he said.
Some of the videos and details were dramatic, even in parts of the country that have endured several deadly and devastating tornadoes in recent weeks.
KWTV, a CBS affiliate in Oklahoma, aired footage Wednesday of a large tornado crossing Interstate 40 in the city of Shawnee, about 40 miles east of Oklahoma City. Separately, the Bureau of Meteorology said baseball-sized hail fell in Grady County, southwest of the metropolitan area.
One of the reasons the weather system was dangerous was becauseIrregularlyThe Norman, Oklahoma, Weather Service office told residents Wednesday.
Burns says most tornadoes move in the same direction as the system they’re part of, but there are exceptions. For example, on Wednesday, several tornadoes veered northwest as the larger system headed northeast-east.
“The tornado can go any way it wants,” he said in a pre-dawn phone call from Norman’s office.
Tornado warnings for Oklahoma and neighboring states were lifted overnight, but nearly five million residents in Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska and Missouri were on alert for severe thunderstorms as of 5 a.m. rice field. It lands in Arkansas, Oklahoma, or Texas on Thursday afternoon.
Either way, according to tracking site poweroutage.us, Oklahoma will have a lot of infrastructure to fix. Most of them were in Pottawatomie County, east of McLane.
One of the affected sites in Pottawatomie County was Shawnee’s Oklahoma Baptist University.university said early thursday No one was injured, but the storm damage to the campus was “significant.” They then announced that Thursday and Friday classes would be cancelled.
In McLane County, some people affected by the storm have taken refuge in their homes, while others have taken refuge in a local high school, Deputy Gibbons said. There were no reports, he added.
Scientists have not yet been able to determine whether there is a link between climate change and tornado frequency or intensity. But they say tornadoes appear to be occurring in larger clusters in recent years, with the region of the United States where most tornadoes occur, an area of the Great Plains known as Tornado Alley, moving eastward. It says it looks like
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