DAMASCUS, Ark. — Violent storms rolling across the nation’s midsection unleashed tornadoes, high winds and hail in four states and killed seven people in Arkansas on Friday, including a teenager who died when a tree fell into her bedroom as she slept.
The storms late Thursday and early Friday ripped off roofs and toppled train cars near Kansas City, Mo.; pelted parts of Oklahoma with hail; and knocked over tents at a popular open-air market in east Texas. Severe thunderstorms were moving into Kentucky and could make for a wet Kentucky Derby today.
Greg Carbin, a meteorologist for the national Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Okla., said as many as 25 tornadoes may have cut through stretches of Oklahoma, Arkansas, eastern Kansas and western Missouri.
Five of those killed were in two north-central Arkansas counties, Conway and Van Buren, that also saw fatalities from a devastating tornado Feb. 5. Gov. Mike Beebe declared those counties and five others disaster areas.
“This year it just seems like we’re getting pounded,” Van Buren County Sheriff Scott Bradley said.
He said a man, a woman and a preschool-age child died when the storm hit their house just south of Bee Branch.
“There wasn’t anything left,” Bradley said. “It was demolished.”
Another child who lived at the home had already left for school, escaping injury.
Near the Oklahoma line in a working-class neighborhood of Siloam Springs, a 15-year-old girl died in the early morning when apparent straight-line winds toppled a tree into her family’s mobile home. She and her 10-year-old brother were sleeping in bunk beds; the boy survived with minor injuries.
“She was on (the top bunk). He was on bottom. When it fell it just crushed her and pinned her on top of him,” with a mattress between them, a neighbor said.
The storms moved into Kentucky and Tennessee on Friday evening, and other severe weather developed in Illinois, forcing the cancellation of more than 200 flights at Chicago’s busy O’Hare International Airport.
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