Severe storms threaten 120 million, man killed in Des Moines

A sprawling severe-weather outbreak kept hammering the Midwest on Thursday, with more than 120 million people in the path of potentially dangerous storms and no clear break for communities still cleaning up from earlier damage. In Des Moines, a 54-year-old man died after a tree broke apart and fell on him as storms passed through a homeless encampment in a park in the 3300 block of Martin Luther King Jr. Parkway.

Police said the man was found critically injured around 8 a.m. Thursday and died at the scene. The fatality underscored how quickly the storm pattern turned dangerous across the region, where people faced not just wind and hail, but falling trees, blocked roads and downed utility wires before recovery from the previous round of damage could begin.

The broader outbreak had already produced days of destructive weather across the Upper Midwest and Plains. The National Weather Service said it received more than a dozen reports of tornadoes on Wednesday in northern Missouri, Iowa, Kansas and Illinois, while severe winds and storms knocked out power to several hundred thousand homes and businesses. The same system also triggered more than a thousand flight delays and cancellations, with Chicago airports taking a heavy hit.

Thursday marked Iowa’s third consecutive day of severe weather, one day after a 350-mile derecho began near Waterloo. Weather service meteorologist Frank Pereira said the frontal system that produced the storms was moving eastward, and warned that another area of severe weather could develop from Iowa and northern Missouri northeastward through the Great Lakes later in the day. Meteorologists said the setup was being fueled by cool air from Canada colliding with warm, humid air from the South, a classic collision that can keep storms organized and dangerous over a wide area.

The result was a rolling national risk, not a one-day event: tornadoes, damaging wind, hail, widespread outages and travel chaos all piled up before many communities had time to assess the last round of destruction. With the storm line still shifting east, the threat remained far from over.