East Tennessee and North Carolina are reeling from a spate of severe storms, which have left at least three people dead and carved a trail of destruction across 900 miles. The violent weather, spanning from Kansas to the East Coast, was marked by 13 reports of tornadoes and hundreds of other incidents of hail and damaging winds, according to FOX Weather.
The devastation included Tornado Emergencies, the most urgent of warnings, issued in Tennessee and Alabama. In Tennessee's Claiborne County, tragedy struck when a person lost their life after a tree toppled onto a vehicle, as reported by WBIR. Over in North Carolina, a similar fate befell an individual in Gaston County after a tree crushed their car. Meanwhile, Columbia, Tennessee, bore witness to a large tornado that claimed yet another life and injured four others, detailed a spokesperson for Maury Regional Health to CBS News.
Nearly 240,000 power outages plagued the Southeast in the aftermath, per data from PowerOutage.us. The cascading natural chaos prompted school closures and delayed starts throughout affected regions due to flooding and infrastructural ravages. Images of the damage and tennis ball-sized hail were circulating on social media, with photo submissions from viewers flooding in.
Tornado Warnings and Severe Thunderstorm Warnings were omnipresent on Wednesday, generating a steady stream of alerts into the night. Tornadoes, once thought to be a rarity in darkness, proved to be a dangerous reality in states from Missouri to Texas. The National Weather Service in Nashville pressed the severity of the situation with a tornado watch for parts of Arkansas, Mississippi, Missouri, and Tennessee until the early hours of Thursday, as echoed in a statement obtained by CBS News.
In a testament to the storm's breadth, the National Weather Service has confirmed that tornadoes also touched down in Western Ohio on Tuesday night. These storms emerged on the heels of a destructive twister that ravaged an Oklahoma town earlier in the week, painting a picture of a nation besieged by tumultuous weather across the board.
