At least 5 dead as ‘abnormal’ hurricane-force winds batter US

At least five people died as a powerful and extremely unusual storm system swept across the Great Plains and Midwest amid unseasonably warm temperatures, spawning hurricane-force winds and possible tornadoes in Nebraska, Iowa and Minnesota. In southeastern Minnesota, Olmsted County Sheriff’s Lieutenant Lee Rossman said a 65-year-old man was killed Wednesday night when a 40-foot (12-metre) tree blew onto him outside his home. In southwestern Kansas, blinding dust kicked up by the storms Wednesday led to two separate crashes that killed three people, Kansas Highway Patrol trooper Mike Racy said. And in eastern Iowa, a trailer truck was struck by high winds and rolled onto its side on Wednesday evening, killing the driver, the Iowa State Patrol confirmed. The storm shifted north of the Great Lakes into Canada on Thursday, with high winds, snow and hazardous conditions continuing in the upper Great Lakes region, the National Weather Service said. More than 190,000 homes and businesses remained without electricity on Thursday afternoon in Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa and Kansas, according to poweroutage.us, which tracks utility reports. A tornado was reported in southern Minnesota on Wednesday and, if confirmed, it would be the state’s first on record in December. The small community of Hartland, Minnesota, might have been the hardest hit, with a reported 35 to 40 homes sustaining minor damage and a few businesses severely damaged, county Emergency Management Director Rich Hall said. Losses also included livestock. Dozens of cows were electrocuted at a dairy farm after a power pole landed on a milking barn in Newaygo County, in western Michigan. Tim Butler said his workers at the dairy survived the event, but at least 70 cows died. Dozens survived, but many were “hurt bad”, Butler said. More wild weather hits US as Biden promises aid to tornado-hit Kentucky The destructive weather system developed amid unprecedented warmth for December in the Plains and northern states. That included temperatures that rose to 70 degrees Fahrenheit (21 degrees Celsius) across southwestern Wisconsin on Wednesday evening. The Weather Company historian Chris Burt compared the heat to that of a “warm July evening”. “I can say with some confidence that this event (the heat and tornadoes) is among the most (if not THE most) anomalous weather event ever on record for the Upper Midwest,” Burt wrote in a Facebook post. The winds knocked down trees, tree limbs and nearly 150 power lines in northern and western Michigan’s Lower Peninsula. In the western Michigan village of Fruitport, high winds peeled back a portion of Edgewood Elementary School’s roof, leading officials to close all district schools on Thursday. There were more than 20 tornado reports Wednesday in the Plains states, scattered mostly through eastern Nebraska and Iowa, based on preliminary reports to the Storm Prediction Centre. The storm system led to the most reports of hurricane-force wind gusts – 75mph (120km/h) or higher – on any day in the US since 2004, the centre said. “To have this number of damaging wind storms at one time would be unusual any time of year,” said Brian Barjenbruch, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Valley, Nebraska. “But to have this happen in December is really abnormal.” The governors of Kansas and Iowa declared states of emergency. ‘I’m worried sick’: US workers trapped as Amazon factory collapses amid tornado The system came on the heels of devastating tornadoes last weekend that cut a path through states including Arkansas, Missouri, Tennessee, Illinois and Kentucky, killing more than 85 people. On Wednesday, there were at least 59 reports of hurricane-force wind gusts region-wide, which exceeded the 53 recorded on August 10, 2020, when a rare derecho wind storm struck Iowa, the Storm Prediction Centre said. The destruction on Wednesday, however, was far less severe than from last year’s derecho, which caused billions of dollars of damage. The winds also whipped up dust that reduced visibility to zero in parts of Kansas and caused at least four semi-trailers to blow over, leading officials to temporarily close much of Interstate 70, as well as all state highways in nine northwestern Kansas counties. Kansas deployed helicopters and other firefighting equipment to help smother at least a dozen wind-fuelled wildfires in western and central counties, officials said Thursday. That dust and smoke was carried north by the storm and concentrated over parts of Kansas, Nebraska and Iowa, causing a dramatic drop in air quality in those areas late Wednesday. That spawned a glut of calls to already-taxed emergency dispatchers from people reporting the smell of smoke. The system blew into the Plains from Colorado, sending gale-force winds across a swathe from New Mexico to Minnesota, Wisconsin and upper Michigan. The weather service recorded a gust of 107mph (172km/h) on Wednesday morning at Lamar, Colorado, and gusts of 100mph in Russell, Kansas. Severe weather the ‘new normal’ after US tornadoes disaster Scientists say extreme weather events and warmer temperatures are more likely to occur with human-caused climate change. However, scientifically attributing a storm system to global warming requires specific analysis and computer simulations that take time, haven’t been done and sometimes show no clear connection. “I think we also need to stop asking the question of whether or not this event was caused by climate change,” said Northern Illinois University meteorology professor Victor Gensini. “We need to be asking, `To what extent did climate change play a role and how likely was this event to occur in the absence of climate change?’” The unusually warm temperatures on Wednesday were due in part to record high ocean temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico, which would not have happened without global warming, said Jeff Masters, a Yale Climate Connections meteorologist who co-founded Weather Underground.