At least 51 people have been killed as a tornado at least a half a mile wide roared through the Oklahoma City suburbs, flattening neighbourhoods and destroying a school as children and teachers huddled against winds up to 200mph.
It is thought at least 20 of the dead were children, and officials said the death toll is expected to rise.
The storm laid waste to scores of buildings in Moore, a community of 41,000 people about 10 miles south of Oklahoma City. Street after street lay in ruins, homes were crushed into piles of broken wood and cars and trucks were left crumpled on the roadside.
The National Weather Service issued an initial finding that the tornado was an EF-4 on the enhanced Fujita scale, the second most-powerful type of twister.
More than 120 people were being treated at hospitals, including about 50 children. Search-and-rescue efforts were continuing through the early hours.
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In a video of the storm, the dark funnel cloud could be seen marching slowly across the green landscape. As it churned through the community, the twister scattered shards of wood, awnings and glass all over the streets.
The tornado also destroyed the community hospital and some stores. Moore’s mayor Glenn Lewis watched it pass through from his jewellery shop.
“All of my employees were in the vault,” he said.
Chris Calvert saw the menacing tornado from about a mile away.
“I was close enough to hear it,” he said. “It was just a low roar, and you could see the debris, like pieces of shingles and insulation and stuff like that, rotating around it.”
At Plaza Towers Elementary School, the storm tore off the roof, knocked down walls and turned the playground into a mass of twisted plastic and metal.
Children from the school were among the dead, but several were pulled alive from the rubble. Rescue workers passed the survivors down a human chain to the triage centre in the car park.
James Rushing, who lives opposite, heard reports of the approaching tornado and believing he would be safer there, ran to the school, where his five-year-old foster son Aiden is a pupil.
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“About two minutes after I got there, the school started coming apart,” he said.
A map provided by the National Weather Service showed that the storm began on Monday west of Newcastle and crossed the Canadian River into Oklahoma City’s rural far south-western side about 3pm local time. When it reached Moore, the twister cut a path through the centre of town before lifting back into the sky at Lake Stanley Draper.
Captain Dexter Nelson of Oklahoma City Police said downed power lines and open gas lines posed a risk in the aftermath of the system.
The weather service estimated that the tornado was at least half a mile wide. The 1999 storm had winds clocked at 300 mph.
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Kelsey Angle, a weather service meteorologist in Kansas City, Missouri, said was unusual for two such powerful tornadoes to track roughly the same path.
It was the fourth tornado to hit Moore since 1998. A twister also struck in 2003.