Three killed, several injured after reports of tornadoes in Midwest

WINCHESTER, Ind. – At least three people were killed and dozens were injured after a parade of severe weather marched through Indiana, Kentucky and Ohio overnight, spinning off at least six devastating tornadoes, officials said.

Around Indian Lake, a reservoir in Ohio that becomes a bustling resort area in the summer, the storm caused two deaths in a mobile home park Thursday night, and a third in a home early Friday, according to Dr. John O’Connor, the Logan County coroner.

All three people died from “blunt force trauma,” the coroner said. Around two dozen others from the area, about 70 miles northwest of Columbus, were treated for broken bones and other wounds, said Laura Miller, a spokesperson for Mary Rutan Hospital in Bellefontaine, Ohio. About half of those were still in the emergency room Friday morning, she said.

“We have never experienced anything like this, anything this severe in the 75 years that I’ve lived around here,” said John Coleman, the president of the Indiana Lake Area Historical Society, who was driving the streets of Russells Point, Ohio, on Friday morning, looking at homes that were missing second stories.

Meteorologists were still surveying the damage Friday to establish the number and strength of tornadoes in the outbreak. The National Weather Service office in Wilmington, Ohio, had confirmed five in the state by early Friday afternoon, although Kristen Cassady, a meteorologist, said that number could grow.

In eastern Indiana, the towns of Winchester in Randolph County and Selma in Delaware County were badly hit by at least one tornado, which razed buildings and tore roofs off homes.

“It sounded like a ripping from the heavens. It was really scary,” said Marcy Kindred, 25, who huddled in a bathroom with her 84-year-old grandmother Thursday night in Winchester. After the storm passed, Kindred found she could look at the sky through her roof.

The homeland security emergency management office in Randolph County said in a statement early Friday that 38 people had been injured, with 12 taken to hospitals.

In Delaware County, due west of Randolph, nearly half of all the structures in the small town of Selma were damaged, the county emergency management agency said in a statement.

The line of storms was expected to continue to push through the South on Friday, with thunderstorms that could produce damaging winds, especially in Georgia and Alabama.

There was at least some threat of a brief spin-up of a tornado, but that was not the likely scenario.

Across south central Texas on Friday, thunderstorms were likely to bring damaging winds and hail that could reach 2 to 3 inches in diameter.

In Ohio and Indiana, search and rescue crews were still checking houses Friday morning, spray-painting Xs outside homes where they had looked. But the overall death toll had not risen as of midday, as some had feared.

Small towns in rural counties took the brunt of the damage, and resources that were never intended for post-tornado relief were put to work in the aftermath. In Ohio, dump trucks fitted with snowplows were dispatched by the state’s Department of Transportation to clear downed trees and other debris off roadways. In Winchester, Indiana, Bob Barnes, who runs a septic tank-cleaning business, quickly got to work setting up some of the portable toilets he had brought in for the throngs of crowds expected to come to Winchester for next month’s solar eclipse.

But even as neighbors helped one another out, the scale of destruction was hard to fathom.

The Rev. Andy Price said not much was left of Cornerstone Baptist Church in downtown Winchester. The roof was gone and the church’s maintenance shed had just vanished, he said.

“I had been remodeling that church for the past seven years,” Price said. “I was just about done.”

In southeastern Indiana, a tornado damaged at least 29 homes, said Matt True, the director of the emergency management agency in Jefferson County. Meteorologists believe this same tornado bounced across the Ohio River and left a trail of destruction in Kentucky.

The emergency management director in Trimble County, Kentucky, Andrew Stark, said that 20 to 30 homes had been severely damaged there, with some roofs shorn off and walls destroyed.

“It’s a mess,” Stark said.

Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky said a tornado also hit Gallatin County and possibly Carroll County.

Just outside Russells Point, Amy Brooks, 58, had spent Thursday night crouched in a bathroom with her two dogs as tornado sirens blared and debris slammed against her house. On Friday, she stood outside and took stock of her neighborhood, disfigured by mangled trees and strewn with wreckage. “A war zone,” she said.

“Where do you start?” she said. “You put on your gloves and you go start.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.