OKLAHOMA CITY — Communities in several southern Plains states set to work cleaning up Thursday after a night of storms that spawned 51 tornadoes, assessing the damage under sunny skies but with the threat of even worse weather on the horizon.
The storms strafed northern Texas, Nebraska and Kansas on Wednesday and early Thursday but reserved their worst for the Oklahoma City area, where at least a dozen people were injured in a trailer park and where a 42-year-old woman was killed. The woman, whose name wasn’t released, apparently took cover in an underground storm shelter and then drowned when it was deluged by floodwater, police Sgt. Gary Knight said.
While residents assessed the damage early Thursday afternoon, a large cluster of thunderstorms was developing in western Oklahoma that was expected to bring hail and damaging winds to the state. Meanwhile, the conditions appeared to be ripe for storms that could produce more powerful tornadoes in the Plains on Friday and Saturday, said meteorologist John Hart of the Storm Prediction Center in Norman.
“The conditions are right; it’s the right time of year,” Hart said. “There are just a lot of things that make you think over the next three days there will probably be big tornadoes across the southern Plains.”
An area covering southern Kansas, western Oklahoma and parts of North Texas would likely bear the brunt of the storms Friday and Saturday.