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A storm swept through the suburbs of Washington, D.C. on Wednesday evening amid tornado warnings, damaging a few homes in Gaithersburg, Md., and injuring a handful of people, officials said.
Officials advised people to take cover in Montgomery County in Maryland after the National Weather Service office in Washington issued a tornado warning and called it a “particularly dangerous situation.”
“We believe there were multiple tornadoes,” said Pete Piringer, a spokesman for the Montgomery County Fire and Rescue Service.
A tornado was believed to have touched down in a residential area of Gaithersburg in Montgomery County, about 20 miles northwest of the nation’s capital, Mr. Piringer told reporters.
He added that there were at least three occupied buildings there that were struck by trees.
Officials said they had removed at least five occupants from one of the homes. Four sustained non-life threatening injuries and one suffered a traumatic injury, David Pazos, an assistant fire chief in Montgomery County, said on social media.
Downed trees and power lines littered roadways in Gaithersburg, Mr. Piringer said, and there were reports of damage in the nearby communities of Poolesville and Germantown.
Video on social media showed a menacing wall of gray funneling down to the ground in the distance in Poolesville as the Weather Service issued multiple tornado warnings for the area, including Harford County, Baltimore County and the city of Baltimore. Most were set to expire by 9:30 p.m.
The United States has come under an intense onslaught of deadly tornadoes in recent weeks, with much of the destruction happening in the plains and the Midwest.
Though tornado activity in the DMV is not rare, it is less common than in other parts of the country. Parts of Maryland had come under a tornado watch late last month.
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