Tornadoes barrel through Mass., 4 people dead

Residents of 18 small communities in central and western Massachusetts were left to deal with widespread damage Thursday, a day after at least two late-afternoon tornadoes shocked emergency officials and residents more accustomed to dealing with snow and bone-chilling cold than funnel clouds spawned by spring storms.

The storms killed at least four people and injured about 200.

Gov. Deval Patrick told ABC’s “Good Morning America” on Thursday that considering how quickly the tornadoes formed, he feels fortunate there weren’t more fatalities.

“When I spoke with the mayor of Springfield yesterday, he told me they had about ten minutes’ warning,” Patrick said. “When you consider how quickly the tornadoes developed and then touched down, the fact that there wasn’t even greater damage and loss of life is a remarkable thing.”

The state normally averages about two tornadoes per year, with the last lethal twister in 1995.

Sens. John Kerry and Scott Brown joined Patrick on a helicopter tour of the damaged areas, including Springfield, the state’s third-largest city. Kerry said it looked like a “blast zone” and was confident that federal disaster aid would be made available, particularly because of damage to businesses.

“It was obviously an incredible surprise ... we’d been monitoring the weather all day and by early afternoon nobody was overly concerned ... but by late afternoon some storm clouds started to appear,” spawning tornadoes that battered several towns, said Peter Judge of the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency.

“Getting severe thunderstorms is not very unusual for a late afternoon at this time of the year, but damaging tornadoes in heavily populated areas are rare,” Judge said. “We may have a couple of very slight tornadoes during the course of the year.

They end up being in the forest somewhere, but not in major populated areas.”

The storm pulverized or sheared off the tops of roofs on Main Street in Springfield, a city of more than 150,000 west of Boston. A mounted video camera captured dramatic footage of a debris-filled funnel as it swept into downtown from the west, then swirling across the Connecticut River.

The governor declared a state of emergency and called up 1,000 National Guardsmen after the storms, which brought scenes of devastation more familiar in the South and Midwest to a part of the country where such violent weather isn’t a way of life.

Patrick said the death toll was preliminary and police and firefighters were going door to door in Springfield to assure that no one was trapped in damaged buildings.

U.S. Sen. Scott Brown planned a tour on Thursday of the areas hardest hit by the tornadoes.

Massachusetts hasn’t experienced a tornado since 2008, according to the Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Okla. The last killer tornado in Massachusetts was on May 29, 1995, when three people died in Great Barrington, a town along the New York state border. The state’s deadliest recorded tornado on June 9, 1953, killed 94 people in the Worcester area.

The Rev. Bob Marrone was pained to see the steeple of his 137-year-old church shattered and strewn on the grass in the central Massachusetts town of Monson, yet he knows he’s more fortunate than some of his neighbors who lost their homes after tornadoes tore through the state.

“I can see the plywood of roofs, and see houses where most of the house is gone,” said Marrone, pastor of The First Church of Monson. “The road that runs up in front of my house, ... there’s so many trees down, it’s completely impassable.”

The storm knocked out power to tens of thousands of customers. Crews from utilities in Connecticut and New Hampshire worked Thursday to help restore service.