Tornadoes sweep Midwest

RIVERSIDE, Missouri -- A series of large tornadoes -- one as wide as five football fields -- swept across eastern Kansas and Missouri on Sunday afternoon.

At least one person has died in Wyandotte County, Kansas, emergency management officials said. Early reports indicated that people were being treated at hospitals for broken bones and other injuries.

Local television stations reported a tornado on the ground in southern Leavenworth County, Kansas, moving toward the Missouri border. Live images from news helicopters showed significant damage to homes. Large trees were toppled and roofs were blown off. Power was knocked out through much of the region.

One witness reported seeing emergency personnel trying to rescue horses that had been blown into a tree.

Missouri Gov. Bob Holden was in Kansas City for a Cinco de Mayo celebration and will remain there because of the situation, said Ed Gray, a staff duty officer with the Missouri Emergency Management Agency.

The storm system has moved east, producing tornadoes in other communities.

In some places, the swath of destruction was a quarter-mile wide.

Providence Medical Center in Kansas City, Kansas, confirmed that it was treating injured tornado victims, one of several reported in Kansas and Missouri. Officials there could not estimate how many injured were there.

Army National Guard Maj. Gen. Greg Gardner, Kansas' director of emergency management, said state officials knew of four tornadoes that touched down: one each in Leavenworth, Wyandotte, Miami and Crawford counties.

He did not have a damage estimate.

The largest tornado first touched down west of Bonner Springs in Leavenworth County, Kansas, about 3:30 p.m. [4:30 p.m. EDT], said Lynn Maximuk, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Pleasant Hill, Missouri.

It moved through Leavenworth and Wyandotte counties and into Platte and Clay counties in Missouri, leaving a path of destruction in its wake.

The tornado reached 500 yards across at its widest, Maximuk said.

In Kansas, footage from television news helicopters showed homes torn down or damaged in Wyandotte County. There were also reports that a subdivision was flattened in Leavenworth.

At Kansas City International Airport, officials stopped flights and evacuated the terminals. Passengers were ushered into tunnels leading to parking garages. After about 30 minutes, the passengers were allowed to leave.

The television footage also showed water spurting from what appeared to be a flattened industrial park south of Parkville, Missouri, in Platte County.

All roads leading into Parkville were closed by emergency crews.

In nearby Riverside, debris littered an interstate highway, and a storage facility appeared to have been ripped up and moved off its foundations.

In Missouri, the National Weather Service also issued tornado warnings for Jackson County in the Kansas City area and for Buchanan County in the St. Joseph area.

Warnings were also issued for Linn and Miami counties in Kansas, and Cass County, Missouri, south of the Kansas City metropolitan area; Bates County, Missouri, east of Kansas City; and for Labette and Cherokee counties in southeast Kansas.