At least 25 people died after a big storm system tore through the Midwest, the South, and the Mid-Atlantic on Saturday night, bringing tornadoes and severe thunderstorms.
The most recent deaths took place in Tennessee and Delaware.
Saturday night, the sheriff of McNairy County, Tennessee, said that nine people had died. He said that all of the people who died were in buildings that were completely destroyed.
Chip Guy, a spokesman for the county, said that an apparent tornado hit southeast of the small town of Greenwood in Sussex County, Delaware. This caused one death.
It wasn’t clear how many people were hurt, if any, but he said that “several structures” were hurt.
Guy said that recovery efforts in Delaware were put on hold while they waited for another line of bad weather to pass. The apparent tornado was part of the same loud weather system that hit the Midwest and South overnight.
The National Weather Service was trying to confirm the tornado reports by sending people out to look at the damage, which can take time.
The weather service field office in Nashville said on Saturday, “We will look at the damage from likely tornadoes that hit many of our Middle Tennessee counties overnight, including Wayne, Lewis, Marshall, Rutherford, Cannon, and Macon Counties.” “There is damage all over, so it will take us a few days to get to all of these places.”
According to a list of storm reports collected by the agency, there are downed trees, power lines, and “houses with heavy damage” in more than one county.
Five of the U.S. deaths have happened in Cross and Pulaski counties in Arkansas, four in Boone and Crawford counties in Illinois, three in Sullivan County, Indiana, one in Pontotoc County, Mississippi, one in Madison County, Alabama, and one in Tipton County, Tennessee, according to officials.
Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a tweet that the storm system caused a lot of damage in Wynne, which is in the northeastern county of Cross in Arkansas. Four people died there.
Sanders said there was “significant damage” in Central Arkansas on Friday after meteorologists said a tornado hit North Little Rock and hit buildings, killing at least three people and hurting dozens more.
Sanders said at a news conference on Friday, “Today has been a very hard day for the state of Arkansas.” “But this is a good thing because Arkansas and Arkansans are tough and resilient. No matter what happens, we will get up the next day and keep going.”
On Friday afternoon, Arkansas called a state of emergency and sent in the National Guard. Sanders said at a news conference on Friday that 100 guardsmen had been sent to different parts of the state.
Sanders went to places where tornadoes hit on Saturday.
“A fire station in West Little Rock got a lot of damage, but the real story here isn’t the damage. It’s the heroes who came out of the tragedy,” she said in a tweet. She also said in another tweet that Wynne High School also got a lot of damage.
A preliminary report from the National Weather Service says that a severe weather event in northeastern Illinois and northwestern Indiana caused “widespread wind damage with multiple tornadoes,” thunderstorms, and scattered large hail.
State police confirmed that three people died in Indiana, and a tornado in Boone County, Illinois, in the city of Belvidere, killed a 50-year-old man and hurt 28 others when the roof of the Apollo Theater in Belvidere caved in on Friday night. Belvidere fire officials say that five of the 28 people who were taken to the hospital were hurt very badly.
Officials in Belvidere couldn’t say if concertgoers were warned or if anyone was told to move to a safe place. The loud concert may have made it hard for people to hear the tornado sirens that went off Friday night in the area.
It’s not clear how many tornadoes hit Illinois and Indiana, but the National Weather Service said that Baileyville, Belvidere, Mendota, downtown Batavaia, and Merillville, all in Illinois, had structural damage and could have had tornadoes.
On Saturday, the governor of Indiana, Eric Holcomb, signed an order that put Sullivan and Johnson counties in a state of emergency.
The National Weather Service field office in Northern Indiana says that two teams will look at storm damage all over Indiana on Saturday. This includes Allen County and White County.
More than a half-million utility customers were without electricity in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia, West Virginia, and Tennessee, according to grid tracker PowerOutage.us.
This story was first posted on NBCNews.com.
