At least one tornado touched down in an upstate New York town during a violent spate of weather that killed five people on the East Coast, officials said on Wednesday.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo toured the hard-hit town of Smithfield, outside Syracuse, where four people were killed and at least four homes were destroyed in storms on Tuesday.
"It looks like literally a bomb went off in a house," Cuomo said. "We just see devastation everywhere."
New York victims included a 35-year-old mother and her 4-month-old daughter who died when their double-wide mobile home was leveled by the tornado, and a man who died with his dog in a house around the corner, Madison County Sheriff Allen Riley told reporters.
Barbara Watson, a National Weather Service meteorologist who inspected the Smithfield site, said the tornado that hit was at least an EF2, the second level of severity on the five-step Enhanced Fujita scale, with wind speeds well over 100 mph.
In Carroll County, Maryland, northwest of Baltimore, one boy was killed and eight others, aged 15 and under, were injured when they tried to take shelter from tree branches and other debris being whipped around by the wind.
(Additional reporting by Eric M. Johnson from Seattle; Writing by Steve Gorman; Editing by Louise Ireland and Peter Cooney)