Tornadoes rip through Midwest, killing 6 and devastating neighborhoods

Ted Rowlands, Holly Yan and Michael Pearson in CNN: Hundreds of thousands of people were without power and hundreds were without homes across the Midwest on Monday after powerful storms wreaked havoc in three states. The worst damage appeared to be in Illinois, where six people died.

Gov. Pat Quinn declared seven counties a state disaster area, including Tazewell County, where a tornado left parts of Washington, Illinois, in ruins. "Devastation. Sadness. People that lost everything," is how Washington Mayor Gary Manier described the scene to CNN's Chris Cuomo on "New Day."

...Another tornado in Washington County, Illinois, east of St. Louis, left a path of debris that stretched more than three miles, according to a preliminary survey by the National Weather Service.

While the bulk of the storm had moved offshore into the Atlantic Ocean and the threat of severe weather Monday was small, damaging wind gusts of up to 40 mph were still possible in parts of the Northeast, CNN meteorologist Indra Petersons said Monday morning. In the Great Lakes region, 50 mph gusts were possible, she said.

The storm struck Washington around 11 a.m. Sunday, when many of the town's 10,000 residents were at church. The timing may have been a blessing: Dozens of homes were destroyed, but only one person is known to have died in Washington, a city of 10,000 just west of Peoria, Illinois.

"It was complete destruction," resident CNN iReporter Anthony Khoury, who filmed the tornado tearing through his neighborhood, said Sunday. "There are people in the streets crying."...

A Category F5 tornado (upgraded from initial estimate of F4) viewed from the southeast as it approached Elie, Manitoba on Friday, June 22nd, 2007. Shot by Justin Hobson (Justin1569 at en.wikipedia), Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license