7 dead as tornadoes rip through US Midwest

Dozens of tornadoes swept across the US Midwest in a rare November blast of warm-weather storms, leaving at least seven people dead and unleashing powerful winds that flattened entire neighborhoods, flipped over cars and uprooted trees.
With communications difficult and many roads impassable, it remained unclear how many people were killed or hurt yesterday by the unusually strong late-season tornadoes.
An elderly man and his sister were killed when a tornado hit their home in rural Illinois. Four other people were killed in the state, the hardest hit by the tornados, said Patti Thompson of the Illinois Emergency Management Agency. She did not provide details.

In Michigan, officials said a 21-year-old man died when his vehicle was crushed by a fallen tree and a 59-year-old man was found dead and entangled in high-voltage power wires.
As the rain and high winds slammed into the Chicago area yesterday, officials cleared a football stadium and moved teams off the field for a couple of hours, in a highly unusual interruption of a National Football League game.
Just how many tornadoes hit was unclear. According to the National Weather Service's website, a total of 65 tornadoes struck, most of them in Illinois. But meteorologist Matt Friedlein said the total might fall because emergency workers, tornado spotters and others often report the same tornado.

Matt Friedlein, a weather service meteorologist, said that 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 yesterday were expected to reach into the 60s and 70s Fahrenheit (from 16 to 26 degrees Celsius), which he said is warm enough to help produce severe weather when it is coupled with winds, which are typically stronger this time of year than in the summer.

In Illinois, Gov. Pat Quinn declared seven counties disaster areas.
Between 250 and 500 homes were either damaged or destroyed in the town of Washington, Mayor Gary Manier said today. He said it wasn't clear when residents would be allowed to return.

"Everybody's without power, but some people are without everything," Manier told reporters in the parking lot of a destroyed auto parts store and near a row of flattened homes.
"How people survived is beyond me," he said.
The tornado cut a path from one side of town of 16,000 people to the other, knocking down power lines uprooting trees and rupturing gas lines, State Trooper Dustin Pierce said.