Severe storms bring tornado threat from the Midwest to the Southeast
Dangerous conditions erupted across multiple states on May 8, leading to tornado and flash flood emergencies.
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00:00 Tony, we've been tracking a number of these cells here in Tennessee, Kentucky and Illinois,
00:05 and it looks like a lot of straight line wind seen gusts of 65-75 mph in eastern Missouri
00:11 moving into Illinois with also a tornado threat into some areas.
00:15 Yeah, Jeff, we certainly don't want to rule out any tornado threats.
00:20 We got a new tornado watch that was just issued a couple hours ago, that going until midnight
00:24 for southern Illinois because that tornado potential still is there.
00:28 We are currently northbound on Interstate 57, about to make our way over toward the
00:32 Cessar area to get in front of the storms that are coming through the Pinckneyville
00:36 area.
00:37 As you mentioned, tornado potential with those straight line winds, probably the more significant
00:41 threat, and of course the flooding issue.
00:43 We've seen a lot of flooding across the region as these storms.
00:46 We've had multiple rounds.
00:47 This is just another round getting set up for you here.
00:49 It has been a busy day.
00:50 We're going to show you on the radar here.
00:51 We're going to get you in on southern Illinois.
00:54 These are the storms that we are tracking currently here.
00:56 Pinckneyville, they are under the tornado warning right now.
00:58 See, it's mainly a line of storms, but notice on the southern part of that, down toward
01:04 just to the west of Murfreesboro, crossing the river right now into Illinois, the tail
01:08 into that storm and then there's that isolated cell there behind it.
01:11 We're not done with the tornado threat by any stretch of the imagination, and I'm certainly
01:15 concerned that those storms, if they can root down near the surface, certainly can be tornadic.
01:19 But again, hail, and I think it's going to be damaging winds and flooding, which are
01:22 going to be the biggest concerns for us here.
01:25 We've already been around the region here.
01:26 Harrisburg, several small tornadoes touching down south of Route 13.
01:30 We have seen damage from that, ranging from trees to minor roof damage.
01:33 We do know of an outbreak of hail and flooding.
01:40 So dealing with a lot going on right now, Jeff, we're going to continue to track these
01:43 storms well into the evening.
01:45 We're going to be watching for more storms coming out of Missouri.
01:48 This could be a multiple threat throughout the rest of the night.
01:50 All right, Tony.
01:51 We appreciate that report here.
01:53 And it is kind of interesting to see how some of these storm fragments are interacting with
01:58 one another as we have some convection kind of feeding up into the south side of this
02:02 eastbound squall line, where while it's predominantly a straight-line wind threat, at the moment
02:07 with this behaving as it is, again, there is the risk of a tornado here.
02:11 And you can see a slight increase there with the inbound versus outbound here near Denny
02:17 and near and immediately south of Pinckneyville.
02:20 And this is one of the cells that Tony was talking about here.
02:24 So again, there is a risk for a tornado in that area amid otherwise straight-line winds
02:28 for many areas.
02:30 And Tony mentioned a couple of those cells, kind of stragglers off to the west still in
02:34 southeast Missouri.
02:35 They will be pivoting east, and some of them could also introduce a tornado threat.
02:38 Well, here we have a flash flood emergency.
02:40 This is a new development here, and I wanted to zoom in on this here.
02:43 A flash flood emergency into parts of Sumner County, Tennessee and Robertson County, Tennessee.
02:48 Turning our reports on here, here is one report near White House.
02:52 That was earlier flooding reported at White House High School, but that was hours ago.
02:56 That's not the motivation behind this ongoing flash flood emergency.
02:59 We want to take a look at some of these estimates of 24-hour rainfall.
03:05 And well, we can see that there are estimates of 6-plus inches of rain for some in this
03:10 area.
03:11 And as we switch back over to the high-res radar to see the current status of heavy rain,
03:16 it's still coming in.
03:17 So a flash flood emergency into the area around Portland, Tennessee.
03:21 This is where I-65 steps into Tennessee from northern Kentucky.
03:24 In fact, if you're really a geography buff, you might be familiar with this little interruption
03:29 there in the Kentucky-Tennessee state line there.
03:33 So it's near that cutout near Mitchellville and down to Calistia and Bagginsville crossplains.
03:39 Dangerous flash flooding.
03:40 That's a flash flood emergency from Portland to Greenbrier there in northern middle Tennessee.
03:44 Thank you, Dan.
03:46 We're dealing with another tornado threat here.
03:48 So a brand new update to the area we were talking about earlier.
03:52 We are looking at a new tornado warning kind of extrapolating forward, motion forward into
03:56 Franklin County of Illinois and Jefferson County, Illinois, southern parts of Jefferson
04:00 County, south of Interstate 64 as the eastbound movement is going to continue.