Tornadoes hit Oklahoma, Arkansas

Tornadoes raked Oklahoma and Arkansas during the Wednesday evening rush hour, killing one person in suburban Tulsa and injuring others.

Tulsa County Sheriff's Capt. Billy McKelvey said one person was killed in a mobile home park near suburban Sand Springs, Oklahoma that was nearly destroyed Wednesday amid severe weather. It wasn't yet clear whether it was a tornado or straight-line winds that hit the park, which McKelvey said could accommodate 40 to 50 trailers. McKelvey said he believed at least 15 people were hurt, but he did not have an exact number yet.

Rain, lightning and winds hampered rescue efforts, said the Maj. Shannon Clark. 

"Conditions are deplorable," he said.

Mobile homes were tipped over, and the tornado left large parts of the area without power, officials said.

In Tulsa, the roof of a gynmastics training facility collapsed when more than 50 girls, ages 3 to 13, were inside, reported the Tulsa World newspaper. None were injured, according to the state's Emergency Management Services Authority.

Tornadoes were seen elsewhere in Oklahoma, as well as in Arkansas, but no injuries were reported from those.

A small tornado swept across parts of Moore, an Oklahoma City suburb where 24 people died in a top-of-the-scale EF5 tornado in 2013. Other twisters formed along a line from southwest of Oklahoma City to east of Tulsa, and some touched down in the Ozark Mountains of northwestern Arkansas.

Until Tuesday, when a waterspout formed over an Arkansas lake, the U.S. hadn't had a tornado in more than a month.

Television video Wednesday evening showed roof damage in a Moore neighborhood — the Moore storm two years ago scraped lots to their foundations. A glass door at the Tulsa building that houses the National Weather Service office was smashed, and several cars in the parking lot lost their windows.

Don Ruffin said he and a neighbor were at a convenience store in far southeast Moore when he saw the tornado approaching.

"I don't know how close it was to us, but it looked like it was coming toward us, and so we didn't take any chances," Ruffin said. "We got in our vehicles, ran home and got in our shelters."

The Oklahoma Department of Emergency Management said statewide, nearly 80,000 power outages were reported. The Oklahoma Highway Patrol said an overturned tractor-trailer had snarled traffic on Interstate 35, a major north-south route.

The tornado season usually ramps up for parts of the U.S. in March, but weather patterns funneled cold air into much of the country, depriving the atmosphere of the warm, moist air necessary to form bad storms for most of the month.

That all changed this week. Southerly winds pushed temperatures into the 70s and 80s across the Ozarks and Southern Plains, while weather fronts churned the air into Wednesday's storms.

Before this week, only about two-dozen twisters had been recorded this year during a period when about 120 are typical. The last time the U.S. had no twisters in March was nearly 50 years ago, according to figures from the Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma.

Wire services