Widespread damage as tornadoes rip through the Midwest

At least six people were killed and dozens of others injured in an unexpected late-season outbreak of tornadoes and intense thunderstorms that swept through the Midwest on Sunday.

Hundreds of thousands of people across the storms' paths, which stretched from Missouri to Kentucky, struggled without electrical power after winds flattened homes and knocked down power lines across the region. 

The storms hit Washington, Ill., a rural community of 16,000, with deadly force. The weather service estimates the tornado there registered as an EF-4, packing winds up to 200 mph.

"The whole neighborhood's gone. The wall of my fireplace is all that is left of my house," area resident Michael Perdun said by cellphone. He said his neighborhood was wiped out in a matter of seconds.

"I stepped outside, and I heard it coming. My daughter was already in the basement, so I ran downstairs and grabbed her, crouched in the laundry room, and all of a sudden I could see daylight up the stairway, and my house was gone."

Several blocks of houses were erased from the landscape in Washington, ripped from their foundations. 

Two people died in New Minden in southern Illinois, one in Washington and three in Massac County, also in southern Illinois.

Reporting from devastated Washington, Al Jazeera correspondent Diane Easterbrooke said 100,000 people in the area remain without power. Cellphone service falters, keeping residents from finding out if friends and loved ones are safe. 

Authorities there declared a curfew from dusk to dawn Sunday and Monday nights because of storm damage.

Illinois State Police Trooper Dustin Pierce said the tornado cut a path from one end of the town to the other, knocking down power lines, uprooting trees and rupturing gas lines.

"I went over there immediately after the tornado, walking through the neighborhoods, and I couldn't even tell what street I was on," Washington Alderman Tyler Gee told WLS-TV. "Just completely flattened, some of the neighborhoods here in town — hundreds of homes."

The National Weather Service's Storm Prediction Center website received at least 76 tornado reports late Sunday in Illinois, Indiana and Michigan. Weather service meteorologist Matt Friedlein said the final tornado count may fall because emergency workers, spotters and others often report the same tornado.

As the weather service issued its severe weather warnings for the region, officials said the last such warning issued so late in the season came in 2005.

In Illinois an elderly man and his sister were killed when a tornado hit their home around noon in rural New Minden, said coroner Mark Styninger.

In a news release, the Illinois National Guard said it has dispatched 10 firefighters and three vehicles to Washington to assist with immediate search and recovery operations.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency said it has deployed an assistance team to Illinois and has sent liaison officers to Indiana and Ohio.

While people across the region scrambled to their basements for shelter as the storms approached, officials at Chicago's Soldier Field temporarily evacuated the stands and briefly postponed the Bears football game.

Tornadoes are common in the region, but it is rare for them to occur this late in the year, so the severity of Sunday's storms came with the added danger of surprise.

"People can fall into complacency because they don't see severe weather and tornadoes, but we do stress that they should keep a vigilant eye on the weather and have a means to hear a tornado warning, because things can change very quickly," said Matt Friedlein, a weather service meteorologist.

Friedlein said that such strong storms are rare this late in the year because there usually isn't enough heat from the sun to sustain the thunderstorms.

But he said temperatures Sunday had been expected to reach into the 60s and 70s, which he said is warm enough to produce severe weather when coupled with winds, which are typically stronger this time of year than in the summer.

"You don't need temperatures in the 80s and 90s to produce severe weather (because) the strong winds compensate for the lack of heating," he said.

"That sets the stage for what we call wind shear, which may produce tornadoes."

Late-season tornadoes happen more often than people might realize, he said, pointing to a November 2010 twister near Rockford, Ill.

On Sunday, agency officials said that parts of Illinois, Indiana, southern Michigan and western Ohio were at the greatest risk of experiencing tornadoes, large hail and damaging winds throughout the day.

Strong winds and atmospheric instability swept across the central Plains during the day before pushing into the mid-Atlantic states and Northeast by evening. 

Al Jazeera & The Associated Press