NICOLLET, Minn. (AP) — Lumber from obliterated buildings was scattered among corn stalks, concrete foundations were exposed where houses once stood and silos were crushed like empty aluminum cans after deadly storms swept across the northern Plains with twisters and hail as large as grapefruit.
In southern Minnesota, 70 homes were lost, dozens more structures suffered damage and hundreds of cattle were killed or loose. Some wandering cattle caused car accidents a day after the storm, officials said Friday.
"There's a lot of devastation," said Tom Doherty, chief deputy in the Le Sueur County Sheriff's Office. "We have areas that you can't believe a house was there. Crops, you wouldn't even know there was a crop there. Cornfields, there's nothing left."
More severe weather rolled across Missouri Friday; most of the Jefferson City area lost power for about two hours as people headed to work and school.
In New York, the city was under a rare tornado warning for about a half hour Friday. No tornado touched down, the National Weather Service said. Ninety-year-old Thomas O'Brien died when a tornado struck his home in rural Lake Emily, Minn., Thursday night. Close to two dozen residents were treated at hospitals for broken bones and other non-life-threatening injuries, Le Sueur County spokeswoman Roxy Traxler said.
Minnesota saw multiple tornadoes, and the one that caused the most damage stayed together for at least 20 miles, National Weather Service meteorologist Karen Trammell said. That twister was classified Friday as an F-3, meaning winds ranging from 158 to 206 mph.
In Wisconsin, a woman was stunned when lightning apparently struck her as she left a supermarket in Waukesha County. In Indiana, wind gusting more than 100 mph off Lake Michigan blew over trees and knocked out power along a 30-mile-wide stretch.
Twisters, heavy rain and hail as big as grapefruit also struck the Dakotas, stripping trees of their leaves, and power was knocked out around the region on Thursday.
"I was worried about whether I was going to be here today," Jeff Miller said Friday, surveying the debris just south of Wolsey in eastern South Dakota. "That used to be a barn," he said.
In the Southwest on Thursday, a flash flood closed Interstate 40 for more than an hour, and a man and boy died when their car was swept away as they tried to drive across a ditch east of Gallup, N.M.
Small-town residents in southern Minnesota spent Friday clearing downed trees, rounding up cattle and digging through debris for personal belongings.
In the state's Nicollet County, a tornado had ripped roofs, fronts or sides from farm homes along a 12-mile stretch of highway between Nicollet and St. Peter. Utility poles lay along the road, and some treetops were sheared off.
"It's remarkable that more people weren't injured or killed given the strength of this and width of this," Gov. Tim Pawlenty said of the storm's path about 70 miles south of Minneapolis.