Oklahoma tornado kills 8

UPDATED:

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — An unusual cluster of February twisters touched down across Oklahoma Tuesday, ripping off roofs, littering roads with downed power lines and killing eight people in a small southern town.

Emergency responders searched into the night in the hardest-hit community of Lone Grove, where eight people died and 14 people sustained serious injuries, said Oklahoma Department of Emergency Management spokeswoman Michelann Ooten.

Rescuers found one woman injured but alive under an overturned mobile home, but eventually they suspended efforts until daybreak because of numerous electricity lines down.

Structures have been damaged or destroyed throughout the town of about 4,600, some 100 miles south of Oklahoma City, said Chester Agan, assistant emergency manager for Carter County.

A twister also touched down in the Oklahoma City metropolitan area, where homes and businesses were damaged, but only three minor injuries were reported. A tornado also was reported in north-central Oklahoma and six homes were destroyed near the Oklahoma City suburb of Edmond.

In Edmond, a body shop and the vehicles inside were twisted into a ball of metal after a tornado moved through.

“It’s just surreal,” shop manager Michael Jerry said. “You just don’t believe it. Especially knowing you were just there minutes before. The steel girders are in a ball.”

Tornado watches were issued Wednesday for Mississippi, north-central Louisiana, southeast Arkansas and parts of Missouri and Tennessee.

In northwest Oklahoma City, the twister apparently developed near Wiley Post Airport and then headed northeast before damaging several shopping centers and restaurants at a major intersection.

One wall of a Chuck E. Cheese restaurant collapsed, windows were blown out, and a piece of the eatery’s awning was thrown into a tree alongside an adjacent restaurant. Signs were stripped and cars were damaged in the parking lot.

It then moved through the Boulder Ridge Apartments, a spread of two-story units surrounding a courtyard.

Shawn Tiesman, 33, moved to the apartment complex from Iowa about four months ago and got his first taste of Oklahoma’s notorious weather but without the same protection of his former home.

“Where I’m from, we’ve got basements,” Tiesman said. “I’m amazed that there’s no basements here.”

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