A devastating, multi-day tornado outbreak leveled entire neighborhoods and businesses starting Friday, upending lives across several states in the American Heartland.
Dozens of tornadoes, several EF2 or stronger, have already been confirmed by damage surveys in the areas. The storms have killed at least five people, including four in Oklahoma hit by particularly lethal nighttime tornadoes Saturday into Sunday.
Aerial photographs captured the scope and scale of the destruction.
The frenzy started on Friday afternoon when a storm put down tornadoes as it tracked just to the north of Lincoln, Nebraska. One tornado crossed I-80 and collapsed a building with dozens of people inside, injuring three people.
The storm then tracked north and east toward Omaha, spawning a tornado that ripped through its western suburbs. Rows of homes were flattened, some pushed off their foundations by the tornado, which was at least an EF3 with 136 mph winds.
Aerial photos from one of those suburbs, Elkhorn, show just how powerful the twister was. It treated homes on one block like piñatas, disemboweling them and strewing their contents across nearly every square inch of open space.
Freshly built homes in a new neighborhood were reduced to piles of timber.
The storms kept moving, skimming the east side of Omaha’s airport. Travelers in the terminal huddled together in storm shelters while the twister crushed a general aviation area and flipped small planes. No one was hurt. Others had a window seat view of it as it spun like a hellish top.
The storms kept going into Iowa. Videos showed a large wedge tornado, so-called for its notable squatness, ripping into the small town of Minden, in Pottawattamie County. Dozens of homes were mowed down in the county and at least four people were injured, one of whom died.
The storms finally died down in the late evening hours, but not before producing 92 reports of tornadoes across Texas, Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas and Missouri.
The forecast was even more grim Saturday, but the storms seemed like they might not reach their atmospheric potential in the afternoon. Despite a relative dearth of tornadic storms in the early part of the day, danger eventually came in the darkness.
More than 20 tornadoes ripped across Oklahoma and the surrounding region Saturday into Sunday, including at least two EF3 tornadoes, one of which leveled the downtown of Sulphur late in the evening hours. An EF4 hit Marietta, Oklahoma.
At least four people were killed in Oklahoma, all in places hardest-hit by tornadoes: Sulphur, Holdenville and Marietta.
CNN’s Rebekah Riess contributed to this report.
