The death toll from a major storm system that has lashed the south-central and eastern US with devastating winds and destructive tornadoes has risen to at least 29, officials said on Sunday.
Tennessee, one of the hardest-hit states since the storms began on Friday, initially had seven weather-related fatalities but the toll there later rose to nine, according to the Memphis-based news channel WREG.
The tornado twisted trees, flattened homes into piles of wooden boards and ripped walls from still-standing structures in Tennessee.
“The whole house, you can feel it shaking,” said Janice Pieterick, whose house doors and glass windows blew out when the tornado swept through Lewis county. “We just all hunkered down.”
The toll in Tennessee came on top of the 17 deaths reported in Arkansas, Mississippi and Alabama in the south, Indiana and Illinois in the midwest, and Delaware in the mid-Atlantic. The storm system left dozens injured.
It sent multiple tornadoes – some of exceptional size and rare power – sweeping through Arkansas, where they killed at least five people, the state’s governor said. Daylight revealed extensive damage, with several homes torn apart, cars overturned, power lines toppled and trees ripped out of the ground.
The governor, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, declared a state of emergency and activated the national guard to help with recovery efforts. She said she had spoken to President Joe Biden, who promised to expedite federal aid.
Wynne, in north-eastern Arkansas, was “cut in half by damage from east to west”, the city’s mayor, Jennifer Hobbs, told CNN.
The National Weather Service had issued tornado warnings for several other states, from as far north as Iowa to the southern state of Mississippi, where a twister last week killed 25 people and caused extensive property damage.
Calamity struck in the Illinois town of Belvidere, outside Chicago, on Friday when severe weather caused the roof and part of the facade of the Apollo theatre to collapse while a heavy metal band played inside.
TV footage showed emergency personnel carrying out injured concertgoers on stretchers, while video posted on social media showed waist-high rubble on the floor of the venue and a gaping hole in the roof.
The Belvidere fire chief, Shawn Schadle, reported one death and 28 injuries, including five people with serious injuries.
In Crawford county in southern Illinois, three people died when a house collapsed, probably from a tornado hit, said Kevin Sur, a spokesperson for the Illinois Emergency Management Agency.
In the neighboring state of Indiana, three people were killed by a storm in Sullivan county, several US media outlets reported, citing local authorities.
The state’s department of natural resources said two campers were found dead after storms hit a state park in Owen county, causing “severe damage” to the campground, according to a statement on Saturday.
Overnight tornadoes also killed one person in Pontotoc county, Mississippi, and one in Madison county, Alabama, emergency officials said on Saturday.
More than 610,000 homes were without power on Saturday, according to the PowerOutage.us website. The situation was improving by Sunday morning but tens of thousands were still without electricity.
As the storm tracked north-eastward, the highest number of outages from Saturday afternoon into Sunday were in the states of Ohio and Pennsylvania.
The mid-Atlantic state of Delaware suffered one fatality from a “collapsed structure” in Sussex county on Saturday evening, according to the county’s emergency operations centre, while several other states in the area remained under high wind warnings.
“Maximum wind gusts could approach 60mph (100km/h) throughout much of the Appalachians, upper Ohio Valley and mid-Atlantic today,” the National Weather System warned.
Tornadoes are common in the US, especially in the centre and south of the country.
Biden on Friday visited the Mississippi city of Rolling Fork, one of the worst-hit areas in last week’s tornado.
In December 2021, tornadoes killed about 80 people in Kentucky.
