[Updated at 3:31 p.m. ET] Tina and Billy Clark saw the funnel cloud approaching and did what many of their neighbors did.
"We just ran and hid in the closet," Tina Clark told CNN after one of a swarm of tornadoes descended Wednesday night into their neighborhood in Hood County, some 30 miles southwest of Fort Worth, Texas.
"I was holding the door shut," Billy Clark told CNN. "You could feel the pressure from inside the house. It was like pulling on the door a little bit. The whole house was shaking really bad. It felt like the house was getting ripped apart, but we couldn't see anything from inside the closet, so we didn't know what exactly was going on."
"You could just hear stuff hitting the house," his wife said.
FULL STORYThe hurricane season opened Wednesday with a flourish, and more specifically, with the debut of its first named storm, Tropical Storm Alvin.
Tropical Depression 1-E was upgraded and named a tropical storm on Wednesday, which happens to be the first day of the Eastern Pacific hurricane season, according to the National Hurricane Center. The Atlantic hurricane season officially starts on June 1, and both seasons end November 30.
"Additional strengthening is forecast during the next 48 hours," the Miami-based hurricane center said, "and Alvin could become a hurricane in a couple of days."
FULL STORYTwo tornadoes ripped into a New Orleans suburb Wednesday afternoon, damaging homes and knocking down power lines, but no injuries were reported, a local government spokeswoman said.
The storm hit in Kenner, Louisiana, near the city's international airport. The tornadoes damaged cars and roofs and brought down trees and electrical wires, Jefferson Parish spokeswoman Kriss Fortunato said.
Mike Efferson, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in New Orleans, said the twister had estimated top winds of 90 mph. The second one had winds of 75 mph, the agency said on its Twitter account.
A powerful spring cold snap brings more rain and snow to a soggy U.S. heartland Wednesday, putting more pressure on riverside communities from the upper Midwest to the Deep South.
The residents of Grafton, Illinois, north of St. Louis, will see the worst of the floodwaters through Friday as the Mississippi River peaks at more than 11 feet above flood stage, the National Weather Service says.
Many along the river's edge decided to evacuate.
But Jerry Eller thought he would wait it out.
"I've got water coming up through cracks in the floor, so I have about 3,000 gallons an hour of pumps running down the basement keeping water out, and that seems to be keeping it down to about an inch," Eller told CNN affiliate KPLR.
FULL STORYA powerful storm that swept across the country will lose its fury Friday and blow out over the Atlantic by day's end, forecasters said.
The weather system stretched from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico on Thursday, and dumped snow in the north central and northeastern United States.
In the Ohio and Mississippi valleys, it poured torrential rain and spawned tornadoes in the Deep South.
The storm took three lives in separate incidents in Missouri, Mississippi and Nebraska.
A "major winter storm" was developing over the western Plains on Monday evening, promising "a plethora of interesting weather conditions," The National Weather Service's Weather Prediction Center said.
"Blizzard conditions are likely over parts of Wyoming, Colorado, western Nebraska and western Kansas" beginning late Monday and lasting through much of Tuesday, the weather service said.
The Denver metro area could see as much as a foot of snow, and the foothills and mountains can expect even more than that.
More than 220 people have been rescued after two ice floes broke off from the Latvian coast and were blown into the Gulf of Riga, Latvian emergency services said Friday.
All 181 people on the larger floe near the capital city of Riga were removed by boat, and 42 people were rescued by helicopter from the smaller floe off the coast of Jurmala, a nearby seaside resort town.
FULL STORYWait a minute, didn't spring start last week? Apparently not.
Folks in parts of a dozen states from Missouri to New Jersey and down to North Carolina and Tennessee are getting an ugly start to their work week. All are under winter storm warnings Monday, according to the National Weather Service.
Accumulations of up to 7 inches will be common in places like St. Louis, Indianapolis and Pittsburgh. Some areas will receive a foot of snow.
FULL STORYWait a minute, didn't spring start last week?
Apparently not.
Folks in parts of a dozen states from Missouri to New Jersey and down to North Carolina and Tennessee are getting an ugly start to their work week.
All are under winter storm warnings Monday, according to the National Weather Service.
Accumulations of up to 7 inches will be common in places like St. Louis, Indianapolis and Pittsburgh. Some areas will receive a foot of snow.
FULL STORY
The deluge of snow from the Rockies to the Midwest won't go away anytime soon, no matter what the calendar says.
Parts of eight states will be under winter storm warning Sunday, despite the fact it's not winter anymore.
The storm threatens to pummel a swath from Missouri to Ohio with 6 to 10 inches of snow, the National Weather Service said.
FULL STORYAbout 100 people suffered minor to moderate injuries in a multi-vehicle crash Thursday south of Edmonton, Canada, Alberta Health Services said on its Twitter feed.
According to official road reports, a snowstorm has made the roadways extremely dangerous. The snowy conditions and smoke from multiple crashes caused by those conditions have resulted in delays of six hours or more, reports say. Snow plow trucks have been pulled off of the roadway because of poor visibility.
Alberta Health Services, Alberta's provincial health authority, lowered its initial estimate of 300 injuries in the pileup in Leduc, south of Edmonton. Most of the injuries were minor, it said, with six considered moderate and one serious.
The Statue of Liberty will reopen to the public by the Fourth of July, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced Tuesday afternoon during a conference call with reporters.
The World Heritage Site was damaged during Superstorm Sandy in October and has been closed to the public since.
The official start of spring is just a day away.
But, along parts of the Upper Midwest and Canada, winter plans to stretch its last hurrah until the waning minutes.
Fourteen inches of snow are forecast for the mountains of New England on Tuesday, prompting school closures from Massachusetts to Maine.
With all the snow this winter, the school system has already burned through the five snow days built into the schedule and will have to make up two more at the end of the year.
FULL STORY
Global warming has propelled Earth's climate from one of its coldest decades since the last ice age to one of its hottest - in just one century.
A heat spike like this has never happened before, at least not in the last 11,300 years, said climatologist Shaun Marcott, who worked on a new study on global temperatures going back that far.
Things are set to get much worse in the future.
FULL STORYA snowstorm that set snowfall records in Chicago yesterday is now giving an unscheduled day off for nearly 1 million students in states to the east.
More than 905,000 public school students are not going to classes Wednesday because of the winter storm slamming the United States, according to school districts in Washington D.C., Virginia, Maryland, and Ohio.
The numbers are a reflection of major districts only, and do not include many smaller districts in the storm-affected area.
The storm could dump as many as 20 inches of snow west of the nation's capital. At least 93,406 customers were without power Wednesday morning in Virginia, Ohio and West Virginia, according to numbers provided by local power companies.
A 30-car accident and bad weather caused the closure of Interstate 70 in and around Vail, Colorado, around 1:30 p.m. MT (3:30 p.m. ET), said Mindy Crane, the spokeswoman for the Colorado Department of Transportation.
"We were seeing blizzard conditions up in that area," Crane said, adding the closure will likely be "fairly lengthy." "We have not been able to find out if there are any injuries or fatalities."
It was a winter weather tale as old as, well, modern time: car vs. the snow plow.
"There's our friend and our nemesis, the plow. Ugh," said David Bradley, whose car was buried Wednesday by a plow clearing streets in Toronto, Canada.
Forty-five minutes later, he was still trying to dig out his car from a fierce snowstorm that paralyzed parts of the United States and Canada, leaving hundreds of thousands with out power and stranding thousands more.
Similar scenes were playing from Wisconsin to Michigan, from Kansas to Texas, as thousands began digging out from a storm that began last Sunday as a blizzard in the Great Plains.
FULL STORY
Cabin fever can breed creativity.
Snowed in and separated from her husband on their 19th anniversary, military wife Martha Bond got out the pots and pans and fashioned a wedding cake out of the fresh snow that fell in her Andover, Kansas, yard, just outside of Wichita.
Her husband, Cliff Bond, is currently deployed. She texted him a photo.
"We had two weddings. We got married on February 26 and then the 5th of March, so this is marking the beginning of wedding week," she said. "I want to see if the cake will last that long without melting."
The worst of a brutal winter storm may be over for many, but plenty of residents of the Great Plains and Kansas are still coping with its effects.
Ice and falling branches downed power lines that are still to be prepared. And the heavy, wet snow made getting around difficult, whether by car or by foot.
FULL STORY[Updated at 10:05 a.m.] The Midwest's second blizzard in as many weeks has contributed to the deaths of at least three people, officials say.
Gobs of wet, heavy snow plopped to the ground early Tuesday in the Kansas City area along the Kansas and Missouri border in what the National Weather Service called a "crippling, historic blizzard." The storm could bring up to 18 inches of snow to parts of Kansas, Missouri and Illinois a day after plastering Oklahoma and Texas.
One person died in Woodward, Oklahoma, when a roof collapsed, the city's mayor said. The other two deaths came in Kansas on Monday in separate weather-related accidents on Interstate 70, the Kansas National Guard said.
CNN storm tracker | Photos | Share images
FULL STORYOne person died in a car accident in Sherman County, Kansas, due to icy roads from a massive winter storm hitting the Great Plains, Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback said Monday afternoon.
FULL STORY
© 2012 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
| Advertising practices | Advertise with us | About us | Work for us | Help
Recent Comments