Good evening. I'm John Yang. A second round of violent weather is barreling across the central and

southern United States after a deadly and destructive Friday night. The storms have spawned

violent tornadoes and fanned wildfires and dust storms that have claimed at least 17 lives and

destroyed scores of homes. More than 200,000 people are without power across five states.

Many of the fatalities have been in Missouri, where at least four tornadoes touched down.

The National Weather Service says there's a heightened threat of tornadoes tonight

stretching from the deep south to the Ohio River Valley.

Earlier, I spoke with Matthew Capucci, senior meteorologist at

my radar. He's in Mississippi tracking the storms. I asked him how unusual a multi-day tornado

outbreak like this is. So either of these two different events would in and of themselves be very

significant. Last night, we saw roughly 140 tornado warnings in a 24-hour

period with numerous fatalities and at least 18 tornado warnings simultaneously. So last night

was a big deal. And yet that's the appetizer for what's been happening all day to day into the

evening hours. We have a level 5 out of 5, a high risk, which is issued only less than 1% of the

time.

And so it's a top-to-year event anyway.

The verbiage the National Weather Service is using is downright alarming when they say things like

volatile, intense, long-track tornadoes.

Long-track tornadoes.

Explain that and why they're so dangerous.

So most tornadoes tend to be towards the lower end of the scale,

an EF0, 1, or 2 on the 0 through 5 scale.

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