TULSA, Okla. (AP) — The slow 
start to the nation's tornado season came to a violent end Wednesday, 
when tornadoes raked Tulsa during its evening rush hour, killing one 
person and injuring others.
Tulsa County 
Sheriff's Capt. Billy McKelvey said one person was killed in a mobile 
home park near suburban Sand Springs that was nearly destroyed Wednesday
 amid severe weather. It wasn't yet clear whether it was a tornado or 
straight-line winds that hit the park, which McKelvey said could 
accommodate 40 to 50 trailers. McKelvey said he believed at least 15 
people were hurt, but he did not have an exact number yet.
"It could have been much worse," he said.
Tornadoes were seen elsewhere in Oklahoma, as well as in Arkansas, but no injuries were reported from those.
A
 small tornado swept across parts of Moore, an Oklahoma City suburb 
where 24 people died in a top-of-the-scale EF5 tornado in 2013. Other 
twisters formed along a line from southwest of Oklahoma City to east of 
Tulsa, and some touched down in the Ozark Mountains of northwestern 
Arkansas.
Until Tuesday, when a waterspout formed over an Arkansas lake, the U.S. hadn't had a tornado in more than a month.
Television video Wednesday
 evening showed roof damage in a Moore neighborhood — the Moore storm 
two years ago scraped lots to their foundations. A glass door at the 
Tulsa building that houses the National Weather Service office was 
smashed, and several cars in the parking lot lost their windows.
Don Ruffin said he and a neighbor were at a convenience store in far southeast Moore when he saw the tornado approaching.
"I
 don't know how close it was to us, but it looked like it was coming 
toward us, and so we didn't take any chances," Ruffin said. "We got in 
our vehicles, ran home and got in our shelters."
Ruffin said after the storm passed, there were some fences knocked down and "patio furniture thrown everywhere."
The
 Oklahoma Department of Emergency Management said statewide, nearly 
80,000 power outages were reported. The Oklahoma Highway Patrol said an 
overturned tractor-trailer had snarled traffic on Interstate 35, a major
 north-south route.
        
        
A Tornado is seen in Sand Springs, Oklahoma, March 25, 2015. A storm system produced at least three  …
 
"Those troopers are working their guts out there right now," Lt. John Vincent said.
The
 tornado season usually ramps up for parts of the U.S. in March, but 
weather patterns funneled cold air into much of the country, depriving 
the atmosphere of the warm, moist air necessary to form bad storms for 
most of the month.
That all 
changed this week. Southerly winds pushed temperatures into the 70s and 
80s across the Ozarks and Southern Plains, while weather fronts churned 
the air into Wednesday's storms.
Meteorologist
 Jeff Hood in Little Rock said a weak waterspout tornado briefly touched
 down in Bull Shoals Lake in Marion County in northwest Arkansas on 
Tuesday night. He said it will likely be classified an EF0 — the weakest
 tornado with wind speeds of 65 to 85 mph. A waterspout forms over 
water. The tornado never made it onto land, and there were no reports of
 damage.
"This will be the 'tornado' that breaks the drought for 
March," Greg Carbin, warning coordination meteorologist for the Storm 
Prediction Center, said before Wednesday's storms hit.
Before
 this week, only about two-dozen twisters had been recorded this year 
during a period when about 120 are typical. The last time the U.S. had 
no twisters in March was nearly 50 years ago, according to figures from 
the Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma.
__
Associated
 Press reporters Ken Miller, Sean Murphy and Tim Talley contributed to 
this report from Oklahoma City. Jackie Quinn with AP Radio in Washington
 also contributed.
  
Deadly Tornado Pummels Mobile Home Park in Oklahoma
		
		By:
		Bob Henson
		
		, 04:03 PM GMT em 26 de Março de 2015
		
		
		
 
		
		Two Oklahoma suburbs took the brunt of damage from a rapid-fire severe
 weather outbreak that developed Wednesday afternoon. At least one 
person was killed and another critically injured when a tornado and/or 
accompanying downdraft winds 
moved across a manufactured home park in Sand Springs,
 just west of Tulsa. A number of mobile homes were reportedly destroyed 
in the high winds. Just south of Oklahoma City, the long-suffering town 
of Moore--struck by catastrophic F5/EF5 tornadoes in 1999 and 2013 and a
 deadly tornado that produced F3 damage in Moore in 2003--experienced 
yet another twister,
 though fortunately a much weaker one than its predecessors. Overall, 
the severe weather on Wednesday covered a swath from central Oklahoma to
 southeast Missouri, producing 
a preliminary count of 8 tornadoes and more than 110 reports of severe hail, some as large as baseballs.
 Figure 1.
Figure 1.
 First responders work to free a man from a pile of rubble after a round
 of severe weather hit a trailer park near 145th West Avenue and West 
17th Street in Sand Springs, Okla., Wednesday, March 25, 2015. (AP 
Photo/Tulsa World, Matt Barnard)
Wednesday’s damage in Sand 
Springs is a painful reminder of our lack of national policy on mobile 
home safety in tornadoes. Winds of no more than 110 mph (a 
borderline EF1/EF2 on the Enhanced Fujita Damage Scale) can 
destroy the roof and walls of a typical manufactured home, or cause it to roll over. Although 
just 5% of Americans
 live in mobile homes, anywhere from 25% to 50% of tornado-related 
deaths in a typical year occur in such homes, including 17 of 47 U.S. 
deaths 
in 2014, 17 of 55 deaths 
in 2013, and 48 of 68 deaths 
in 2012,
 according to data from NOAA’s Storm Prediction Center. Thousands of 
mobile home residents live on acreages with no ready source of safe 
shelter, but even those who live in mobile home parks often lack an 
underground refuge. Although 
the state of Minnesota
 and some localities mandate shelters, safe rooms, and/or an evacuation 
plan when mobile home parks reach a certain size, there is no such 
national requirement. Where shelters do exist, they often fall prey to 
vandalism or are used for other purposes. One Sand Springs resident told
 the Tulsa World that as Wednesday’s tornado bore down, she discovered 
that her RV park’s designated shelter was 
“full of washing machines”. 
 Figure 2.
Figure 2.
 The paths of the Moore, Oklahoma tornadoes from May 3, 1999 (green); 
May 8, 2003 (blue); and May 20, 2013 (red), together with the 
preliminary path of the March 25, 2015 tornado (yellow). This year’s 
tornado crossed the path of the 1999 tornado near the northwest edge of 
Moore and intersected the 2013 path near Interstate 35. Image credit: 
NWS/Norman and 
NWS.
Few
 if any cities have experienced the kind of protracted bad luck with 
tornadoes that Moore has had to deal with (see Figure 2). The city 
endured major twisters on 
May 3, 1999 (killing 36 and injuring 583 along its full path); 
May 8, 2003; and 
May 20, 2013 (killing 24 and injuring 377 along its full path). Wednesday’s tornado was 
far less destructive, mostly knocking out windows and destroying carports and trees, although it blew over some vehicles and 
knocked out the three transmission towers
 of the radio station KOKC (formerly KOMA, which broadcast from a 
separate tower in the mid-1950s that was the world’s largest structure 
at the time). 
TWC's Jon Erdman has a nice article on the 
Moore and Oklahoma City Tornado History.Bob Henson
		
 
	
		
		
		
		
A gorgeous display of mammatus clouds, just before a tornado warning was issued for our area.
 
		
		
Storms rolling in	(
2dogs)
Storms headed our way
 
 
 
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