OKLAHOMA CITY — Communities in several southern plains states set to work cleaning up Thursday after a night of storms that spawned 51 tornadoes, assessing the damage under sunny skies but with the threat of even worse weather on the horizon.
The storms strafed Texas, Nebraska and Kansas on Wednesday and early Thursday but reserved their worst for the Oklahoma City area, where at least a dozen people were injured in a trailer park and a 42-year-old woman was killed. The woman, whose name wasn’t released, apparently took cover in an underground storm shelter and drowned when it was deluged by floodwater, said police Sgt. Gary Knight.
While residents assessed the damage Thursday afternoon, thunderstorms were developing in western Oklahoma that were expected to bring hail and damaging winds.
Meanwhile, the conditions appeared to be ripe for storms that could produce more powerful tornadoes in the plains Friday and Saturday, said meteorologist John Hart of the Storm Prediction Center in Norman.
“There are just a lot of things that make you think over the next three days there will probably be big tornadoes across the southern Plains,” Hart said.
An area covering southern Kansas, western Oklahoma and parts of North Texas would likely bear the brunt of the storms Friday and Saturday.
The likelihood of another round of storms so soon left some residents wondering whether they should wait to begin cleaning up.
Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin declared a state of emergency for 12 central Oklahoma counties. The hardest hit appeared to be the rural community of Bridge Creek, about 30 miles southwest of Oklahoma City, where 25 homes were destroyed.
Flooding remained a concern throughout the region, after 5 to 8 inches fell in many areas, said Forrest Mitchell, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Norman. The 7.1 inches that fell at the Oklahoma City airport easily eclipsed the previous daily high of 2.6 inches, he said.
