Storms roll east after slamming South; 10 deaths reported

[Omaha Steve]

Source: AP

A large storm system took aim at the Northeast on Friday, threatening heavy snow and coastal flooding after heavy winds and possible tornadoes damaged homes and buildings, left thousands without power and caused 10 deaths in a wide swath of the South and Midwest.

Three people were killed by falling trees in Alabama as severe weather swept through the state. In Mississippi, a woman died inside her SUV after a rotted tree branch struck her vehicle, and in Arkansas a man drowned after he drove into high floodwaters. News outlets reported two people died in Tennessee when trees fell on them.

Three weather-related deaths also were reported in Kentucky in three different counties as storms with straight-line winds moved through the state. Gov. Andy Beshear had declared a state of emergency before the storm and on Friday evening the mayor of Louisville, Craig Greenberg, followed suit because of the severe storms, high winds, widespread damage and danger to lives and property.

“I encourage everyone in our community to exercise extreme caution this evening, and in the coming days – do not drive through standing water, do not approach downed power lines, or do anything that would put the lives of anyone at risk,” Greenberg said in a Facebook post.


Read more: https://apnews.com/article/tornado-winter-storm-snow-northeast-41c93dceb0e2bb94146541230b2f851a

[Marthe48]

1. We had high winds overnight

Not anything as horrible as in the report, but this a.m. there are power outages.

[birdographer]

2. We were lucky (sort of)

Our thunder storm consisted of one lightning flash and two thunder booms. Maybe 10 minutes tops. We did have high winds pushing at the tree branches, overlapping the thunder storm. It was all over in 15 minutes. However, we lost power in the first 5 minutes of that and still don't have it back (why does the power always go out at 5:00 on Friday??), they say it will be fixed at midnight tonight. We have a whole-house generator that we haven't run for more than an hour before; now we know that at 6 hours it is spewing carbon monoxide into the house (probably doing it all along, it accumulates till the monitor catches it). Going down to 34 tonight so it will be a cold one for us since we can't go to bed with the generator running (unless we all want to wake up dead). The weather itself was a non-event here in western NC, although clearly it did knock a tree branch down somewhere.