Tornadoes and storms leave a trail of destruction in parts of Texas, Oklahoma and Arkansas.
Seven deaths were reported in Cooke County, Texas, near the Oklahoma border, where a tornado Saturday night plowed through a rural area near a mobile home park, officials said.
In Oklahoma, at least two people were dead after a tornado hit Mayes County late Saturday, the county head of emergency management Johnny Janzen told the Fox News affiliate in Tulsa.
And in northern Arkansas, two people were killed in storms in the early hours of Sunday, local authorities confirmed.
“It’s just a trail of debris left. The devastation is pretty severe,” Cooke County Sheriff Ray Sappington told The Associated Press news agency on Sunday.
The dead included two children, ages two and five, the sheriff said.
Hugo Parra, who lives in Farmers Branch, north of Dallas, said he rode out the storm with about 40 to 50 people in the bathroom of a petrol station.
“A firefighter came to check on us and he said, ‘You’re very lucky,’” Parra said. “The best way to describe this is the wind tried to rip us out of the bathrooms.”
Multiple people were transported to hospitals by ambulance and helicopter in Denton County, Texas, also north of Dallas. But officials did not immediately know the full extent of the injuries.
Elsewhere in Denton County, a tornado overturned tractor-trailers and halted traffic on Interstate 35, county spokesperson Dawn Cobb said. A shelter was opened in the rural town of Sanger.
At least 60 to 80 people were inside a highway truck stop, some of them seeking shelter, when the storm barreled through, but there were no serious injuries, Sappington said.
Storms also caused damage in Oklahoma, where guests at an outdoor wedding were injured. Some 375,000 people were also without power early on Sunday in Texas, Missouri, Oklahoma, Kansas and Arkansas, according to the website PowerOutage.us.
Meteorologists and authorities have issued urgent warnings to seek cover as the storms passed across the region overnight. “If you are in the path of this storm take cover now!” the National Weather Service office in Norman, Oklahoma posted on the social media platform X.
April and May have been busy months for tornadoes, especially in the Midwest. Iowa was hit hard last week, when a deadly twister devastated Greenfield. Other storms brought flooding and wind damage elsewhere in the state.
More severe weather has been predicted for the Great Plains region on Sunday, with tornado alerts still in many places. But in Texas, the National Weather Service said the threat had diminished.
“It’ll rebuild,” Sappington told ABC affiliate WFAA. “It’s Texas.”