US tornadoes: Biden releases federal funds to Arkansas

Federal aid has been made available to people in the tornado-ravaged state of Arkansas, the White House has said.

The state was one of several across the United States' South and Midwest which suffered the effects of a violent storm system over the weekend.

At least 29 people have died in total - of which five were in Arkansas.

One woman in the badly hit town of Wynne said her family "prayed and said goodbye to each other" as a tornado hit, "because we thought we were dead".

Ashley Macmillan said she, her husband and their children huddled with their dogs in the bathroom. A falling tree seriously damaged their home, but they were unhurt.

Four people died in their small community, located some 100 miles (170km) east of the Arkansas state capital, Little Rock.

"We could feel the house shaking, we could hear loud noises, dishes rattling. And then it just got calm," Ms Macmillan told AP news agency.

Two friends embrace in Wynne, Arkansas on 1 April

Wynne High School was badly damaged, with some buildings torn to pieces. One of its teachers, Lisa Worden, said a decision to send pupils home early was critical.

"We got out at 1:30, which was such a God blessing from our superintendent, because otherwise kids would have been on buses and teachers would have still been here. And so that would have been even more devastating," she told Reuters news agency.

Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders spoke to President Biden about the devastation in parts of the state on Friday.

The destruction reached several states, with fatalities reported in Alabama, Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Mississippi and Tennessee.

Tennessee has had highest number of deaths, with twelve reported.

Several buildings of Wynne High School were torn apart by the tornado

In Illinois, the storms led to the collapse of a theatre roof at a packed heavy metal gig in Belvidere, resulting in one death and 28 injuries.

After the storms worked their way east on Sunday, hundreds of thousands of people were left without power across several states.

Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania were the worst affected, according to the US PowerOutage website.

There were warnings of severe thunderstorms across parts of Texas on Sunday, with the possibility of "very large hail and several tornadoes", the US government's National Weather Service said. The thunderstorms are forecast to affect a number of other states too.

Investigators at the Apollo Theater in Belvidere, Illinois, after the monster storm caused the ceiling to collapse

The severe weather comes a week after a rare, long-track twister killed 26 people in Mississippi.

The Mississippi tornado last week travelled 59 miles (94km) and lasted about an hour and 10 minutes - an unusually long period of time for a storm to sustain itself. It damaged about 2,000 homes, officials said.

President Biden visited the state on Friday to pay his condolences.