It has been 24 hours of tornadoes, blizzards, wildfires, flattening winds, and torrential floods for more than 100 million Americans as a large weather system continued to make its way across a vast swathe of the central United States on March 15.
According to authorities, scattered twisters from the night of March 14 killed at least 12 people in Missouri. At least three people have died in Arkansas tornadoes, with 29 more reported injured. Three more died in Texas after crashing their cars in a dust storm. The Kansas Highway Patrol reported eight people died in a highway pileup caused by a dust storm in Sherman County on Friday.
In Mississippi, Gov. Tate Reeves announced that six people died in three counties and three more people were missing. There were 29 injuries across the state, he added in a nighttime post on the social media platform X.
At least 32 confirmed deaths have been reported thus far.
Hurricane-force winds gusting up to 80 mph were predicted across the continent from the Canadian border down to Texas. Those winds caused blizzard warnings in Minnesota and South Dakota, which were both expecting up to a foot of snow and the possibility of white-out conditions.
In Oklahoma, those winds fanned more than 130 wildfires, which burned more than 260 square miles and damaged or destroyed nearly 300 homes.
Jennifer Thompson, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Norman, Oklahoma, described the fire conditions in the central and northern parts of the state as historic and highly anomalous.
Those wildfires threatened to spread across Texas, Kansas, Missouri, New Mexico, and Oklahoma starting on March 14.
A blaze in Roberts County, Texas, northeast of Amarillo, quickly blew up from less than a square mile to an estimated 32.8 square miles, the Texas A&M University Forest Service said on social media platform X. Crews stopped its advance by the evening.
About 60 miles to the south, another fire grew to about 3.9 square miles before its advance was halted in the afternoon.
That wind also left more than 200,000 homes and businesses without power across Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan, according to the website poweroutage.us.
On Saturday afternoon, more than 10,000 people in Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi were without power. This is down from the 77,000 reported without power in Oklahoma alone on Friday night.
Moving even further south, the Storm Prediction Center predicted wind gusts reaching 100 mph on March 15, saying that the fast-moving storm could continue to spawn tornadoes and hail as large as baseballs.
The region most at risk includes eastern Louisiana and Mississippi through Alabama, western Georgia, and the Florida panhandle.
Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp declared states of emergency.
“We have teams out surveying the damage from last night’s tornadoes and have first responders on the ground to assist, Sanders said on X.
Looking ahead, the National Weather Service is predicting the hazardous weather to continue moving east through the weekend into March 17.
“A severe weather outbreak is ongoing across the deep to mid-South states,”the service stated. ”Numerous significant tornadoes, some of which may be long-track and potentially violent, should continue into this evening. Severe thunderstorms will continue to spread across parts of Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, the Florida Panhandle, and Georgia into tonight. Flash flooding is also ongoing in these areas.”
