At least two people were killed when a storm system spawned several tornadoes in and around the Oklahoma City metropolitan area on Wednesday night, the authorities said.
The two deaths were recorded in or near Cole, a town of about 600 people south of the city, Scott Gibbons, a deputy sheriff for McClain County, said by phone overnight. He said the storm had cut a path of damage a couple of miles wide and about 10 miles long, and that a “considerable number” of homes had likely been destroyed.
People elsewhere in the county were injured, Deputy Gibbons added, but he did not yet know how many.
Survey teams planned to investigate damages from several reported tornadoes that touched down in and around the Oklahoma City area on Wednesday, including one that was recorded for a few minutes within the city’s borders, said Ryan Barnes, a National Weather Service meteorologist. He said the strongest one had been recorded in Cole and had lasted for nearly half an hour.
Some of the videos, and details, were dramatic, even for a part of the country that has endured several deadly and destructive tornadoes in recent weeks.
KWTV, a CBS affiliate in Oklahoma, aired footage on Wednesday of what it said was a large tornado crossing Interstate 40 in the city of Shawnee, about 40 miles east of Oklahoma City. The Weather Service said separately that baseball-sized hail had fallen in Grady County, southwest of the metropolitan region.
The weather system was dangerous in part because it behaved “erratically,” the Weather Service office in Norman, Okla., told residents on Wednesday.
Mr. Barnes said that while most tornadoes move in the same direction as the systems they are part of, there are exceptions. On Wednesday, for example, some tornadoes veered northwest as the larger system headed east-northeast.
“Tornadoes can take any track that they please, really,” he said, speaking by phone before dawn from the Norman office.
Tornado warnings in Oklahoma and neighboring states expired overnight, but about five million residents across Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska and Missouri were under a severe thunderstorm watch as of 5 a.m. Mr. Barnes said there was a chance, albeit a low one, of more tornadoes touching down in Arkansas, Oklahoma or Texas on Thursday afternoon.
Either way, there would be plenty of infrastructure to repair in Oklahoma, where about 20,000 electricity customers were without power as dawn approached, according to the tracking site poweroutage.us. Most were in Pottawatomie County, east of McClain.
One of the places that sustained damage in Pottawatomie County was Oklahoma Baptist University in Shawnee. The university said early Thursday that while it was not aware of any injuries, the storm damage to its campus was “significant.” It later said that classes would be canceled on Thursday and Friday.
In McClain County, some people affected by the storm were sheltering at home, and others at a local high school, Deputy Gibbons said. But there had been no reports so far of anyone being unaccounted for, he added.
Scientists are not yet able to determine whether there is a link between climate change and the frequency or strength of tornadoes. But they do say that tornadoes seem to be occurring in greater clusters in recent years, and that the region of the United States where most tornadoes occur, an area of the Great Plains known as Tornado Alley, appears to be shifting eastward.
