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.”
Early reports indicated that a tornado could have touched down in a residential area of Gaithersburg in Montgomery County, about 20 miles northwest of the nation’s capital. Pete Piringer, a spokesman for the Montgomery County Fire and Rescue Service, said on the social media platform X that there were at least three damaged buildings that left people trapped inside.
Officials said they had removed at least five occupants from one of the homes. Four sustained non-life threatening injuries and one suffered “trauma,” said David Pazos, an assistant fire chief in Montgomery County, on X.