Storms Kill 23 in Midwest

At least 23 people have been killed in the US midwest in ferocious storms that have rained grapefruit-sized hailstones and sent tornadoes through Tennessee leaving a 25-mile trail of destruction and 19 people dead.

The Storm Prediction Centre in Oklahoma reported 63 tornadoes across a string of midwestern states, from Arkansas in the south to Iowa in the north.

Witnesses said the storms had come down shortly after nightfall last night accompanied by hailstorms and roaring winds.

Donnie Smith, of the Tennessee emergency management agency, said most of the 19 people who died in the state's Gibson and Dyer counties had been killed at their homes, and that the death toll could be expected to rise. One family of four had been killed in a house in the north-west of the state,he said.

In Newburn, Tennessee, Betty Sisk crouched in a cupboard with her two children while a twister destroyed her wooden house, leaving behind nothing but her concrete front steps.

"In the Arkansas town of Lafe, Dean Rollings told the Jonesboro Sun how he had watched tornadoes approaching him. "We stood in the parking lot and watched the clouds spin, coming from two different directions," he said.

"Then, we could hear the roaring sound. As we stood in the door, the winds picked up debris, and we saw the other one come in another direction within minutes."

The extreme conditions wiped out power to tens of thousands of people in the midwest as far north as the suburbs of Chicago, and knocked down the wall of a clothing store close to the Missouri city of St Louis while shoppers cowered inside.

Tom Lewis told CBS news he had herded customers to the back of the shop after he saw the storm approach.

"It looked pretty ominous outside," he said. "It's just a big rolling mass of cloud, and it's really green behind it, usually carrying hail and rain."

"As soon as we got inside, the windows started to shimmer, to shake, and that's when I yelled at my wife and son and everybody to get back to the back of the building ... By the time we reached the rear of the building, that's when the wall collapsed, right where the cash registers are."

April is considered to be the most dangerous month for storms in "tornado alley", a strip of states along the course of the Mississippi-Missouri river that sees some of the most dangerous tornado activity in the world.

The worst storm to hit the US, the Tri-State Storm of 1925, killed 695 people in Missoiri, Illinois and Indiana.