Tornado outbreak rakes Midwest amid unusually strong June storm
By Meteorologists Mary Gilbert, Briana Waxman
(CNN) — A tornado outbreak with several destructive twisters tore through the Midwest Wednesday evening, leveling buildings and sending debris swirling high into the sky.
The storms also brought hail bigger than baseballs and damaging wind gusts of nearly 80 mph.
A few tornadoes are still possible Thursday morning as storms push through the Ohio Valley, but the main threats will be damaging wind gusts up to 75 mph and flash flooding as storms dump buckets of rain on already saturated ground.
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A powerful tornado tore through Illinois’ Effingham County for more than 20 miles Wednesday evening, damaging buildings and lofting debris. Footage obtained by CNN shows a home completely swept off its foundation and dumped into the road.
“You hear about it all the time, but it’s real devastation,” Effingham County resident Karl Jansen said, describing how the storm tossed a large commercial van into a field more than 400 yards away. “I couldn’t even tell what it was if I didn’t know,” he said of the mangled van.
CNN has reached out to Effingham County Emergency Management and other local officials for further information.
A tornado was also reported in the small village of Blue Mound, Illinois, about 30 miles east of Springfield. Drone footage obtained by CNN shows an elementary school with part of its roof missing amid scattered debris, with parts of a classroom visible. Elsewhere in town, trees snapped and fell on homes.
In nearby Macon, the National Weather Service reported power poles snapped off near a major highway.
In the Indiana town of Stinesville, a potent tornado caused a structure’s roof to collapse, and emergency officials worked to rescue people inside, Town Board President Scott McGlocklin told CNN Wednesday evening.
Besides Indiana and Illinois, tornadoes have been reported in Iowa, Kentucky, Ohio and Wisconsin during the outbreak. As of early Thursday, more than 120,000 customers were without power across the Midwest, according to PowerOutage.US.
This latest batch of Midwest storms adds insult to injury for a weather-weary region that can’t seem to catch a meaningful break this month: A multi-day siege of storms last week produced more than 1,500 reports of wind, hail and tornadoes in the central United States.
Wednesday’s storms started early in the day when powerful wind gusts rolled through Iowa and northern Illinois in the morning. These storms produced a hurricane-force wind gust of 94 mph near Albion, Iowa — about 50 miles northeast of Des Moines, Iowa.
A BNSF freight train derailed near Monmouth, Illinois, Wednesday morning as those severe thunderstorms tracked through the area. The derailment appeared to be caused by powerful straight line winds, Monmouth Chief of Police Joe Switzer told CNN, but the cause is still under investigation. There were no injuries or spills reported. The storms also damaged some buildings and downed trees and power lines in Monmouth, according to Switzer.
Thursday’s forecast
Storms will persist for a time in the wee hours of Thursday morning, generally tracking east-southeast. Any remaining threats will clear out of the Midwest Thursday and focus on the East.
A Level 2 of 5 risk of severe thunderstorms covers much of the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast through Thursday evening. The tornado threat in the East is minimal and is mainly confined to northern New England.
A few storms with damaging wind gusts are the primary threat for New York City, Philadelphia, Washington, DC, and Boston during the day.
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CNN’s Kate S. Petersen, Taylor Romine and Karina Tsui contributed to this report.
