Debris litters the area after a storm swept through the area and damaged homes in Sand Springs, Okla. The slow start to the nation’s tornado season came to a blustery end Wednesday when tornadoes hit Arkansas and Oklahoma. (AP Photo/Tulsa World, Matt Barnard) TULSA, Okla. – The slow start to the nation’s tornado season came to a blustery end Wednesday when tornadoes hit Arkansas and Oklahoma, including one that raked Tulsa and its suburbs during the evening rush hour.
Emergency managers reported no injuries when a late-afternoon storm hit Sand Springs, Oklahoma, and raced eastward into Tulsa. Until Tuesday, when a waterspout formed over an Arkansas lake, the U.S. hadn’t had a tornado in more than a month.
Sirens also went off at Moore, Oklahoma, where 24 people died in a top-of-the-scale EF5 tornado in 2013. Television coverage Wednesday evening showed a small twister on the ground. Another tornado was reported near the fairgrounds in western Oklahoma City.
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 for 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.