Tornadoes tear into Oklahoma

OKLAHOMA CITY – A slow-moving storm packing tornadoes and hail battered rural Oklahoma on Saturday, destroying several buildings, tearing up trees and tossing a mobile home onto a highway.

A twister destroyed three barns at a hog farm near Lacey in Kingfisher County, about 75 miles northwest of Oklahoma City, said Michelann Ooten, a spokeswoman for the Oklahoma Emergency Management Department.

No injuries were reported in the state.

“It’s all been out mostly in the countryside,” Kingfisher County Sheriff’s dispatcher Lonnie McDade said. “But that farm happened to be in the path and took a direct hit.”

In Garfield County, a trailer was blown onto state Highway 74 near Covington and power lines were downed, said the county’s emergency manager, Mike Honigsberg.

The storm was slow for a system producing so many tornadoes, said Daryl Williams, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service. “It gives us time to get the warnings out, but where the tornadoes are on the ground, it creates a lot more damage.”

Saturday’s storm followed two days of violent weather in the Midwest. In Kansas, cleanup was under way a day after a storm system raked the state with at least 17 tornadoes that killed at least two people, authorities said.

The two were found Saturday in a car near Pratt, the Pratt County Sheriff’s Office said. The vehicle had been blown 150 yards off a highway.