At least 17 tornadoes blew through Texas, Mississippi, Alabama and Ohio. The storms also dumped snow on parts of the Midwest and deluged the Northeast with heavy rain before moving out to sea Monday.
In Franklin, Texas, about 125 miles south of Dallas, a tornado destroyed 55 homes, a church, four businesses, a duplex and part of the local housing authority building, authorities said. Some people had to be pulled out of damaged dwellings.
Others were not as fortunate. Four people died in Texas, two in Louisiana, and one each in Mississippi and Alabama.
Two of the children were killed when a pine tree fell onto the car they were riding in during a severe thunderstorm Saturday on a back road in East Texas, near Pollok, about 150 miles southeast of Dallas.
The large storm system also caused flash floods in Louisiana. A 13-year-old drowned in a drainage canal that filled with water after flash flooding struck Bawcomville, near Monroe. Separately, one person died when a car was submerged in floodwaters in Calhoun.
Heavy rains and storms raked Mississippi into the night Saturday as the storms moved east. The storm damaged a roof of a hotel in New Albany, Mississippi, and Mississippi State University’s 21,000 students huddled in basements and hallways as a tornado neared the campus in Starkville.
High winds whipped much of the Eastern United States on Sunday, from Ohio to Pennsylvania and from New York south to the Florida Panhandle. Those reports included many tornado warnings, but not necessarily confirmed tornadoes, weather officials said.
By Monday morning, however, the last vestiges of the heavy rainstorms had moved through Boston, and most of the severe weather was pushing off the East Coast. Early morning showers and thunderstorms with brief high wind gusts greeted the morning in Boston, where 32,500 participants in the Boston Marathon were getting ready for race day.
Still, nearly 200,000 customers were without electricity in Pennsylvania, Virginia, New Jersey and New York as of Monday, according to www.poweroutage.us.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.