At least 7 dead as storms hit Oklahoma, Texas and Louisiana

MADILL, Okla. (AP) — Severe weather blew through the South on Thursday after killing at least seven people in Oklahoma, Texas and Louisiana, including a worker at a factory hit by an apparent tornado, a man whose car was blown off the road and a man who went outside to grab a trash can and was swept away in a flood.

More than 150,000 businesses and homes from Texas to Georgia were without power as the severe weather blew eastward, snapping utility lines as trees fell, according to poweroutage.us, which tracks utility reports.

Winds peeled roofing material off a church in Alabama and sent an awning crashing onto a car at a gas station. In Adel, Ga., pieces of metal flew off a building during a possible twister.

About 70 miles east of Birmingham in Anniston, a firefighter and an emergency medical worker were injured when part of a tree fell atop them while they were rescuing a person who was trapped inside a home by a tree that fell during a storm, Anniston EMS said in a statement posted on its Facebook page. The workers and the resident were all taken to a hospital, but none of the injuries was life-threatening, the agency said.

Earlier, an apparent tornado killed three people and injured 20 to 30 more in and around the southeast Texas town of Onalaska. Suspected twisters destroyed 46 homes and damaged another 245 in the surrounding area, according to Polk County Judge Sydney Murphy. The judge told the Beaumont Enterprise on Thursday that the dead included a woman in her 20s, a man in his 50s and another man whose age they don’t know.