The tornado andsevere thunderstorm threatis moving east Wednesday morning, impacting a heavily populated area of the country.
We're currently seeing some tornado warnings spinning up along the Mississippi River, and now reports are coming in of widespread damage and fatalities.
On the national satellite, you can see this powerful line of storms rolling through, streaming up from Texas and right along the central Mississippi River Valley.
Reports from state police say that a twister in Bollinger County, Missouri, just to the west of Cape Girardeau, has caused multiple fatalities, injuries, and widespread damage.
At least five individuals have been reported dead and an unknown number of others injured, according to the Associated Press.
State police say there is an active search and rescue operation underway looking for victims and survivors.
However, this is not over yet. A line moving from Iowa into Illinois shows strong supercell thunderstorms capable of spinning up tornadoes and dropping large hail as they head east, moving into Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan.
Along the bottom of this system, tornado warnings are now in place in Texarkana along the Texas and Arkansas border, and widespread severe thunderstorm warnings are up and down this storm front.
The National Weather Service wants you to take a selfie
Wednesday is #SafePlaceSelfie Day, and the National Weather Service wants you to document where you would go in case of severe weather.
Five tornadoes whipped through parts of Iowa during the severe weather outbreak on Tuesday. One near Pleasantville blew through the fields, but fortunately didn't cause any damage.
We saw a different story in Illinois, where an EF-2 tornadoripped through Colona, just across the Mississippi River from Davenport, Iowa. The tornado destroyed homes and businesses, and two people had to be pulled out of the rubble of a convenience store.
The following are the current severe weather alerts:
The blizzard conditions in North and South Dakota will last until early Thursday morning. Hundreds of miles of interstates across those states are closed and will stay that way all day Wednesday.
The severe weather outbreak and tornado risk are stretching from the Texas-Mexico border up to the Great Lakes.
The biggest risk starts in mid-Michigan and continues down through the Ohio River Valley, where 89 million Americans are in the severe weather risk zone.
The threat is expected to last all day and into the evening on Wednesday. We should get a break across the country starting Thursday, as there is no severe weather predicted for the rest of the week.
