One dead, dozens injured after tornado hits trailer park in western Wisconsin

Updated: 11:25 p.m. | Posted: 7:41 p.m.

Authorities say one person died and at least 20 others were injured when a tornado struck a trailer park Tuesday near Chetek in western Wisconsin.

Barron County Sheriff Chris Fitzgerald told MPR News one man has died at Prairie Lakes Estates trailer park. Fitzgerald says between 20 and 25 people were injured. Searches halted for the night around 11 p.m., but were to resume in the morning.

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The National Weather Service has not confirmed that a tornado hit the area around 5 p.m. Shortly after, the sheriff's department got many calls of people injured and trapped in their homes.

Fitzgerald estimated around 40 homes in the trailer park all sustained some kind of damage.

"I haven't seen anything like this in my 20-year career," Fitzgerald said. "The good that's come out of this is the outpouring of support for the victims here that had houses that are no longer here."

Fitzgerald says many emergency crews are on hand and Mosaic Telecom set up a temporary shelter.

Devin Feuerhelm told KMSP-TV that his sister, Lenna Samuelson, lives in the park with her two daughters, Ashley and Brenna. He said her sister also had her 2-month-old grandson, Nolan, in the home when the storm hit, and they had nowhere to go but the bathtub.

Amazingly, Nolan escaped with just a couple of scratches, he said. Samuelson's daughters suffered minor injuries, and the mother suffered a gash on her head, but he said all are expected to be fine.

While their home was flattened, the SUV next to it was untouched.

A mobile home is a particularly dangerous place to be during a tornado, according to the National Weather Service. The Storm Prediction Center, which specializes in forecasting and gathering data on tornadoes, says that high winds during a tornado can rip a mobile home without a foundation from its moorings. In 2011, when devastating tornadoes struck in Joplin, Missouri, and in Alabama and Mississippi, 111 of the 551 people killed nationwide in tornadoes, or 20 percent, were in mobile homes, according to the Storm Prediction Center website.

The Wisconsin tornado was part of a huge swath of the Plains and Upper Midwest threatened with severe weather. The area stretches from the Texas Panhandle through Oklahoma, western Kansas, Nebraska and Iowa into Minnesota and Wisconsin.