A fast-moving storm system that produced at least one tornado in Illinois threatened some 53 million people across 10 Midwestern states on Sunday, U.S. weather officials said.
"A confirmed large and extremely dangerous tornado" was spotted near Washington, Ill., about 230 kilometres southwest of Chicago, according to the National Weather Service.
Images on television showed extensive damage in Washington, Ill., with structures reduced to rubble and cars turned upside-down.
"There is a lot of debris," Sara Sparkman, a spokeswoman for the health department of Tazewell County, Ill., where Washington is located, told The Weather Channel. "We do know that shelters are being set up in some of the communities because people are being displaced out of their homes because of the storms that hit."
A state official said emergency crews were racing to the area amid reports that people had been trapped in buildings. But communications were spotty — many calls made by to the area by The Associated Press could not be completed — and Patti Thompson of the Illinois Department of Emergency Management said it was difficult to get information from the scene.
Within an hour, the weather service said tornadoes had touched down in Washington, Metamora, Morton and other central communities, though officials could not say whether it was one tornado touching down or several.
It came out of a fast-moving storm system that was headed toward Chicago and threatened a large swath of the Midwest with dangerous winds, thunderstorms and hail.
At Chicago's Soldier Field, where the NFL's Bears were playing the Baltimore Ravens, officials told fans to seek shelter due to hazardous weather conditions.
And in McHenry County, northwest of Chicago, funnel clouds were spotted late Sunday morning, dropping out of the clouds and then retreating again, said Bob Ellsworth, the assistant director of the county's emergency management agency. Ellsworth added that none had touched the ground or caused any damage.
Around the same time, the weather service issued a tornado warning for parts of Kenosha, Racine and Walworth counties in Wisconsin.
'Get ready now'
"We obviously have a very dangerous situation on our hands and it's just getting started," Laura Furgione, deputy director of the National Weather Service, told reporters in a conference call.
A damaged truck is upended on a street destroyed by a storm that hit Washington, Ill., on Sunday. (Anthony Khoury/Twitter)
"Our primary message is this is a dangerous weather system that has the potential to be extremely deadly and destructive ... Get ready now."
The weather service advised that the tornado outside Peoria, Ill., would affect mainly rural areas, with mobile homes likely to be destroyed and trees likely to be uprooted or snapped.
Tornado warnings were in effect for parts of Illinois, Kentucky and Missouri. Weather officials urged residents of areas with tornado warnings in place to take cover in interior, low-floor rooms of sturdy buildings.
The NWS's Storm Prediction Center said the storm was moving dangerously fast, tracking eastward at 97 kilometres per hour, meaning that just looking out at the storm will not be enough to let people know when to take cover.
"These storms will be moving very fast ... They will be at your location and on to the next location in a matter of minutes. As a result, people cannot wait for visual confirmation of the threat," said Russell Schneider of the Storm Prediction Center.
"This is a very dangerous situation ... Approximately 53 million [people] in 10 states are at significant risk for thunderstorms and tornadoes."
'Things can change very quickly'
The potential severity of the storm this late in the season also carries the risk of surprise.
The storm left behind significant damage and destruction in Peoria, Ill. (WEEK-TV/Twitter)
"People can fall into complacency because they don't see severe weather and tornadoes, but we do stress that they should keep a vigilant eye on the weather and have a means to hear a tornado warning because things can change very quickly," said Matt Friedlein, a weather service meteorologist.
According to agency officials, parts of Illinois, Indiana, southern Michigan and western Ohio are at the greatest risk of seeing tornadoes, large hail and damaging winds throughout the day Sunday.
Strong winds and atmospheric instability were expected to sweep across the central Plains during the day before pushing into the mid-Atlantic states and northeast by evening. Many of the storms were expected to become supercells, with the potential to produce tornadoes, large hail and destructive winds.
Friedlein said such strong storms are rare this late in the year because there usually isn't enough heat from the sun to sustain the thunderstorms. But he said temperatures Sunday are expected to reach around 15 to 20 C, which is warm enough to help produce severe weather when it coupled with winds, which are typically stronger this time of year than in the summer.
"You don't need temperatures in the 80s and 90s [around 30 C] to produce severe weather [because] the strong winds compensate for the lack of heating," he said. "That sets the stage for what we call wind shear, which may produce tornadoes."
He also said the tornadoes this time a year happen more often than people might realize, pointing to a twister that hit the Rockford, Ill., area in November 2010.
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