(Omaha) Residents of Omaha, Nebraska, were awakened early Tuesday morning by weather sirens and widespread power outages, as torrential rain, strong winds and large hailstones battered the area and were beginning to move east to threaten more of the Midwest.
A few thousand customers were without power in and around Omaha, and the deluge of more than a dozen inches of rain in less than two hours flooded basements and submerged cars.
KETV showed video of several vehicles submerged in water on a north-central Omaha street and firefighters arriving to rescue those inside.
Although authorities have not confirmed the presence of tornadoes in the area, hurricane-force winds have been reported, said Becky Kern, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.
“We measured gusts of 145 kilometers per hour in Columbus,” said M.me Kern. Columbus is about 90 miles west of Omaha.
Iowa was in the crosshairs of the storms, with the National Weather Service Storm Prediction Center giving most of the state a high chance of seeing severe thunderstorms with the potential for strong tornadoes later in the afternoon and evening.
The storms follow days of extreme weather that ravaged much of the central part of the country.
High winds, large hailstones and tornadoes swept through parts of Oklahoma and Kansas late Sunday, damaging homes and injuring two people in Oklahoma. Another round of storms hit Colorado and western Nebraska Monday night, and the town of Yuma, Colorado, was covered in hail, turning streets into rivers of water and ice.
Last week, deadly storms hit the Houston, Texas, area, killing at least seven people. On Thursday, those storms knocked out power to hundreds of thousands of people for several days, leaving those Texans in the dark and without air conditioning in hot, humid weather, and hurricane-force winds reduced businesses and other debris structures and shattered windows of downtown skyscrapers.
More than 140,000 customers were still without power in Texas as of midday Tuesday, according to the website poweroutage.us.
Storms continued their march across the Midwest on Tuesday and are expected to bring the same high winds, heavy rain and large hailstones to Iowa, Minnesota, Illinois and parts of of northern Missouri, warned Bob Oravec, chief forecaster for the National Weather Service.
“The best chance of severe weather will be large hailstones and strong winds, but there will also be less chance of tornadoes,” Oravec said.
He said the system is expected to turn south Wednesday, bringing more severe weather to parts of Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and southern Missouri.