As storms hit Midwest, resident says: 'The neighbourhood's gone. The wall of my fireplace is all that is left of my house'

Intense thunderstorms and tornadoes swept across the Midwest on Sunday, causing damage in several central Illinois communities and sending people to their basements for shelter. A tornado was also reported in Kentucky.

"We have reports of homes being flattened, roofs being torn off," Sara Sparkman, a spokeswoman for the health department of Tazewell County, Illinois, where Washington is located, said in a telephone interview with Reuters. "We have actual whole neighborhoods being demolished by the storm.

"Fortunately," she added, "we are only hearing of minor injuries at this time."

Sparkman said the storm had caused damage in Washington and Pekin, south of Peoria.

In a telephone interview with the Associated Press, Washington resident Michael Perdun said: "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. The whole neighborhood's gone, [and] the wall of my fireplace is all that is left of my house."

WLS-TV reported that a local grocery store kept customers and workers safe from harm in a freezer during the worst of the storm. A Washington alderman told Chicago's WBBM Radio that there were "quite a few people hurt" but didn't offer details. The damage, he said, was extensive.

"I went over there immediately after the tornado, walking through the neighborhoods, and I couldn't even tell what street I was on," said Alderman Tyler Gee. "Just completely flattened – some of the neighborhoods here in town, hundreds of homes."

Communications were spotty – many calls made by to the area could not be completed – and Patti Thompson of the Illinois Department of Emergency Management said it was difficult to get information from the scene. Photos taken in Washington showed structures were reduced to rubble and houses ripped open.

As the storm darkened downtown Chicago after noon, the Chicago Bears game against the Baltimore Ravens was delayed and fans were ordered out of the stands and players led off the field.

"This is a very dangerous situation," said Russell Schneider, director of the weather service's Storm Prediction Center. "Approximately 53 million in 10 states are at significant risk for thunderstorms and tornadoes."

Schneider noted that the storms were moving at 60mph, which he said would not give people enough time to seek shelter if they were relying on watching the sky alone. The potential severity of the storm this late in the season also carries the risk of surprise.

"People can fall into complacency because they don't see severe weather and tornadoes, but we do stress that they should keep a vigilant eye on the weather and have a means to hear a tornado warning because things can change very quickly," said Matt Friedlein, a weather service meteorologist.

A mattress is wrapped around a stripped tree in Washington, Illinois. Photograph: Steve Smedley/AP

According to agency officials, parts of Illinois, Indiana, southern Michigan and western Ohio were at the greatest risk of seeing tornadoes, large hail and damaging winds throughout the day. Strong winds and atmospheric instability were expected to sweep across the central Plains before pushing into the mid-Atlantic states and north-east by evening. Many of the storms were expected to become supercells, with the potential to produce tornadoes, large hail and destructive winds.

Friedlein said that such strong storms are rare this late in the year because there usually is not enough heat from the sun to sustain the thunderstorms. But he said temperatures Sunday are 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.

"You don't need temperatures in the 80s and 90s to produce severe weather [because] the strong winds compensate for the lack of heating," he said. "That sets the stage for what we call wind shear, which may produce tornadoes."

He also said that the tornadoes this time a year happen more often than people might realise, pointing to a twister that hit the Rockford, Illinois, area in November 2010.