http://ozarkspub.vo.llnwd.net/o37/KSMU/audio/mp3/severestor_158.mp3
Severe storms moved through Southern Missouri Thursday morning, spawning a tornado that left a seven-year-old girl dead. Michele Skalicky reports.
A survey team from the National Weather Service went to Howell County Thursday afternoon to determine if it was, in fact, a tornado that damaged buildings and killed a seven-year-old girl.
John Gagan is a meteorologist with the National Weather Service Office in Springfield.
"They did, indeed, find a tornado. The tornado path began in extreme Eastern Ozark County, 3 miles southwest of the city of Caulfield, and that moved to the northeast pretty rapidly. The touchdown was at 6:26 am, and it moved into the Caulfield region just after 6:30, and at that point it was an F1 on the Fujita scale, and it continued to move rapidly to the northeast, and it strengthened quite rapidly to an F3 rated tornado, and that was just to the southeast of Pottersville, and that's where the fatality occurred where a few mobile homes were destroyed. It continued onto the northeast and weakened and lifted just to the southwest of West Plains."
Gagan says the storms that moved through the Ozarks were part of the same storm system that spawned deadly tornadoes in Georgia and Alabama.