Sedalia, Mo. – Severe storms across the Midwest packed winds that knocked over airplanes, ripped roofs off homes and spawned tornadoes that killed three people.
A twister, which roared up to a half mile wide, killed a woman seeking shelter in her mobile home and displaced about 150 residents in western Missouri on Sunday night, officials said.
Six people were injured and two were missing after the tornado cut a path more than 16 miles long through the town of Sedalia, said Rusty Kahrs, Pettis County presiding commissioner.
Bobby Ritcheson, 23, said he watched his neighbor die when her mobile home collapsed on her south of Sedalia.
“She went in there, and the trailer came down right on top of her,” he said.
Sheriff Kevin Bond described the damage he saw as “large amounts of power lines down, many buildings that are simply no longer there and a tremendous amount of debris.”
Storms rolled through northeastern Kansas earlier in the day with fierce winds that lifted a cargo container off the airfield at Kansas City International Airport, authorities said. At the Charles B. Wheeler Downtown Airport, some private airplanes tied down on the airfield were “spun around,” spokesman Joe McBride said.
The University of Kansas in Lawrence canceled classes today after 60 percent of its buildings were damaged in the storms, school officials said.
James Patterson, 23, was asleep in his Lawrence apartment when a sudden drop in pressure woke him about 8 a.m.
“It felt like I was in the tornado, if that’s what it was,” he said.
The storms followed powerful twisters that ripped across southern Missouri and Illinois on Saturday night, destroying homes along a path of more than 20 miles and killing a couple whose pickup was blown off a road south of St. Louis.
