BELLEMONT, Ariz. — A rare swarm of tornadoes shoved semitrailers off highways and destroyed homes in the pre-dawn darkness Wednesday, leaving startled residents wondering if they were in Arizona anymore or had woken up in the twister-prone Midwest.
Later Wednesday in Utah, a small tornado was reported to have brushed east of Hanksville in southern Utah.
After the first tornado rumbled through Bellemont around 5:30 a.m., residents armed with flashlights emerged from their homes to check on the damage — a house splintered, windows smashed, garage doors twisted, but no major injuries.
"Running through the house, all the Kansas movies go through your head telling you: 'Move to the basement,' " Breanna Hunt said. "But we don't have a basement."
The second tornado struck minutes later east of the small town of a few hundred people nestled in the Ponderosa pines just west of Flagstaff. A third was reported around noon along Interstate 17 south of Flagstaff, but there were no immediate reports of injuries or damage.
The radar showed that many more twisters likely formed, but none of those have been confirmed.
Sparsely populated Arizona typically has four tornadoes a year, but rarely if ever sees twisters come in clusters and cause the kind of damage seen Wednesday, meteorologists said.
"The hammering that northern Arizona is getting right now is exceptional," said National Weather Service meteorologist Ken Waters in Phoenix. "It's not uncommon this time of year to have one or two tornado reports or a warning, but this is quite an outbreak."
The storm system moved across the West over the past few days, dropping record-setting rain in northern Nevada, pounding Phoenix with hail and dumping enough snow in the Sierra Nevada mountains to close a highway pass.
The extreme weather came from a low-pressure system that has been parked over central and Southern California. The system was expected to weaken as it drifts northward.
Arizona, however, was the hardest hit. On Tuesday, storms ripped out trees and broke windows in metropolitan Phoenix, flooded roadways, shut airports and dented cars and shattered windows with hail bigger than golf balls in some places.
On Wednesday, semitrailers were sitting along the side of Interstate 40. High winds cast dozens of cars of a freight train off the tracks in Bellemont around 6:30 a.m. No one was injured and the cars did not contain any hazardous materials.
About 15 homes were so badly damaged that they were uninhabitable and the estimated 30 people who lived in them were evacuated, authorities said. A shelter was set up for them.
National Weather Service forecasters in Salt Lake City had good news for northern Utah residents listening to reports about the southern Utah storms and tornadoes in Arizona with concern they would spread north.
Forecasters predict the stormy weather that ripped through southern and southeastern Utah Wednesday, including reports of a weak tornado east of Hanksville and pingpong-ball-size hail near Lake Powell, would not be coming north.
Northern Utah residents can expect light rain showers through Thursday but the weather will dry up by Saturday, forecasters said.
A ranger called the National Weather Service with reports of the tornado outside of Hanksville, saying juniper trees were uprooted, but forecasters gauged it as a 0 on the Enhanced Fujita scale — the weakest tornado.
Up to 15 inches of snow hit Brian Head Ski Resort just east of Cedar City and forecasters report rainfall up to 4 inches was widespread throughout southern Utah.
Minutes before the first tornado touched down in Arizona, Jeff Cox was standing in his garage, his children nestled in bed. Rain and hail pounded hard against the windows and a fierce wind made it look like houses were swaying.
Then Cox heard a deafening sound, and ducked beneath a flatbed trailer carrying two all-terrain vehicles.
The tornado struck, pushing the trailer two feet, tearing off the roof of nearly his entire home and throwing it and other debris into the nearby forest.
"It was so loud, it sounded like a big boom," his wife, Jennifer, said, through tears, wiping water from collectables she was trying to salvage.
It was directly in the path of the tornado and the most damaged.
Rain later drenched nearly everything inside.
At Brad and Dani Stricker's home, the kitchen cabinets were knocked from the walls of their ranch-style house, the refrigerator was tipped over, every window in the house was busted and the frame was exposed with drywall and glass covering the carpet.
Brad Stricker said he and his wife were lying in bed when the tornado struck, spraying shattered glass. But nothing hit them.
"Miraculously, we're OK," he said.
Contributing: Lana Groves, Deseret News