One person died in Aurora after a tornado touched down there early Saturday morning.
Officials in Lawrence County told KSMU the person died when the top story of a two-story motel in Aurora sustained major damage. The county’s director of Emergency Management, Bonnie Wilt-Schulte, said two motel rooms were “completely destroyed.”
According to the National Weather Service,six tornadoes were confirmed in southern Missouri. Those include four EF-1 twisters that touched down in Aurora, 1 ½ miles south of Billings, three miles west of Republic and two miles north/northeast of Seymour; and two EF-0 tornadoes two miles south of Monett and northwest of Hartville. The tornado that caused the fatality in Aurora had peak winds of 100 mph.
Eric Wise is a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Springfield. He says Spring is typically the season when the Ozarks region sees its severe weather like this.
“We sometimes actually see a smaller, secondary severe season in October and into November—we’re getting kind of late now here in early December—that we can get some storms. They don’t happen as frequent as the Spring, but we can get, again, severe weather and tornadoes any month of the year here in the Ozarks," Wise said.
The storm also brought down trees and caused damage to roofs and fences throughout the region.
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