The tornado screeching across southern Ohio on Monday night triggered a cellphone alert that roused Rich Schlarman. He ignored it. Then came another. That was enough to persuade him to hurry his 83-year-old mother toward the basement.
“We only made it down about four steps when I heard a loud boom,” Mr. Schlarman said. “If we hadn’t made it down as far as we had, we would probably not have made it.”
On Tuesday, his home was a shambles: walls bent, doors tilted, the roof gone — another house crippled amid a stretch of severe weather that has tormented communities from the Rocky Mountains to the Mid-Atlantic in recent weeks.