Two dead, 140,000 without power in Southern Illinois

Intense thunderstorms and tornadoes swept across the Midwest Sunday, causing extensive damage in several central Illinois communities, killing at least two people in nearby Washington County and even prompting officials at Chicago's Soldier Field to evacuate the stands and delay the Bears game.

Mark Styninger, the coroner of Washington County in southern Illinois, said an elderly man and his sister were killed around noon when a tornado hit their home in the rural community of New Minden.

The storm forked both north and south of Du Quoin, brushing Tamaroa in the north Grand Tower, Murphysboro and Carbondale to the south. Ameren initially reported 140,000 Southern Illinois customers without power. Tornado sirens in Du Quoin sounded at 12:15 p.m. The warning ended at 12:45 p.m.

In central Illinois, the town of Washington appeared particularly hard-hit, with one resident saying his neighborhood was wiped out in a matter of seconds by a tornado. At least one person is dead there.

''I stepped outside and I heard it coming. My daughter was already in the basement, so I ran downstairs and grabbed her, crouched in the laundry room and all of a sudden I could see daylight up the stairway and my house was gone,'' Michael Perdun said Sunday afternoon in an interview with The Associated Press.

The Illinois National Guard said it had dispatched 10 firefighters and three vehicles to Washington to assist with ''immediate search and recovery operations in the tornado damaged area.''

According to the National Weather Services' website, a total of 59 tornadoes had struck, the bulk of them in Illinois. Still, when the weather service was issuing its warning that severe weather was bearing down on the Midwest, officials said the last such warning issued in November came in 2005, and the result was an outbreak of 49 tornadoes.

Friedlein said that such strong storms are rare this late in the year because there usually isn't enough heat from the sun to sustain the thunderstorms. But he said temperatures Sunday were expected to reach into the 60s and 70s, which he said is warm enough to help produce severe weather when it is coupled with winds, which are typically stronger this time of year than in the summer.