Six people - three in Missouri and three in Arkansas - died Friday as tornadoes fueled by unusually warm air pummeled the South and Midwest. A seventh person who was injured Friday IN Missouri died Saturday, said Bruce Southard, the chief of the Rolla Rural Fire Department.
The woman, identified by the Phelps County Emergency Management as 74-year-old Ethel Price, was entertaining a friend in her trailer when the twister hit.
Southard said nothing was left of the trailer except for the frame, and that the twister scattered debris 40 to 50 meters from where the trailer was sitting. The women were found under a pile of debris, and Cox died Friday, Southard said.
“It's like you set a bomb off in it,” Southard said.
“It just annihilated it.” At a farm not far away, 21-year-old Megan Ross and her 64-year-old grandmother Loretta Anderson died when a tornado hit where their family lived among three mobile homes and two frame houses, Dent County Emergency Management Coordinator Brad Nash said.
In Mississippi, the National Weather Service confirmed Saturday evening that three tornadoes ripped through the central part of the state on New Year's Eve, causing heavy damage and injuring three people. Officials say it damaged structures, blew out billboards, uprooted trees and overturned a tanker trailer.
The cost of the storm wasn't immediately known, but it was expected to be steep.
In Missouri, state officials received initial reports from nine counties that as many as 280 homes and other structures sustained damage and that at least 50 of them were destroyed.
The Mississippi Emergency Management Agency said 39 homes and 40 businesses were destroyed or seriously damaged by the storms. The storms knocked down trees and power lines.
About 6 inches of rain fell in places, leading to flash flooding.
And emergency management officials in Arkansas say 14 homes and one business in Washington County sustained damage, while in Benton County, 13 homes and five businesses sustained damage.
Missouri's governor, Jay Nixon, began the new year meeting with emergency workers, cleanup crews and residents in the heavily damaged St. Louis County town of Sunset Hills before heading to Rolla.
Both Nixon and Arkansas Gov. Mike Beebe declared states of emergency that could make it easier to eventually obtain federal funding to help with the cleanup effort.
In the northwestern Arkansas hamlet of Cincinnati, volunteers from as far away as Ohio came to help after a twister packing winds up to 140 mph claimed three lives.
Gerald Wilson, 88, and his wife, Mamie, 78, died in their home and Dick Murray, 78, was killed as he was milking cows.
In Missouri, the Red Cross has been giving out hotel vouchers to displaced residents, and Fort Leonard Wood officials were finding places for displaced residents to stay.
Emergency teams in Mississippi were also working Saturday to survey the damage. Forecasters at the National Weather Service's building at the Jackson airport had been forced into a tornado shelter when winds hit 60 miles per hour.
The Clarion-Ledger newspaper in Jackson reported that the storm forced the evacuation of about 200 people from the Jackson-Evers International Airport, where a possible tornado was reported crossing a runway.
Power was knocked out to about 20,000 customers, but by Saturday night, only about 1,500 remained without power. In Missouri, about 8,000 customers were left in the dark on New Year's Eve, but less than 1,000 were still without power by the next day.
