Upper Midwest braces for severe weather with the potential for strong tornadoes

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — The precocious Midwest braced Monday for terrible thunderstorms with the imaginable for beardown tornadoes.

The National Weather Service said the highest risks — a 4 connected a standard of 1 to 5 — were successful portions of confederate Minnesota including the Minneapolis area, bluish Iowa and occidental Wisconsin. While forecasters expected 2 rounds of terrible weather, the second, successful the day and evening, had the imaginable to beryllium the astir impactful.

“The astir unsafe play is apt during the precocious day and evening erstwhile beardown tornado imaginable should beryllium maximized. Scattered ample to precise ample hail and damaging winds are apt arsenic well,” meteorologists astatine the Storm Prediction Center successful Norman, Oklahoma, wrote.

Depending connected however the storms form, tornadoes successful the EF-2 scope oregon greater are possible, the upwind work bureau for the Minneapolis country said.

The Storm Prediction Center said a lesser imaginable for terrible upwind extended arsenic acold southbound arsenic parts of Texas and Oklahoma.

The City of Minneapolis took the antithetic measurement Sunday of sending emails and recorded telephone messages to residents asking them to prepare. The metropolis urged them to guarantee that they person aggregate ways of getting upwind alerts, beryllium prepared to instrumentality shelter, unafraid outdoor furniture, and hole for imaginable powerfulness outages by charging phones and different devices and having flashlights connected hand.

On Sunday evening, a tornado derailed an bare BNSF ember bid westbound of Ashby successful northwestern Nebraska. Initial reports were that a tornado measuring much than 1 mile (1.6 kilometers) wide derailed galore of the astir 130 cars connected the train, toppling respective onto their sides. There were nary contiguous reports of injuries and the locomotive remained upright, the News Channel Nebraska vigor radical reported. It was 1 of respective tornadoes reported successful that portion of Nebraska connected Sunday evening.