A tornado blew through a small central Texas community Saturday, damaging houses and injuring at least four people, authorities said.

The storm cut a wide swath east of Thornton, said Aubrey Briggs, mayor pro tem of the city of roughly 500 people located about 36 miles southeast of Waco.

"It missed the city. It was pretty widespread and pretty destructive," Briggs said. "My sister-in-law saw it. She said it was just a red cloud. It must have been sucking dirt out of the ground."

The National Weather Service said several tornadoes blew through the state Saturday.

A command post was set up at a school in Thornton, where several people were treated for cuts and bruises and some were sent by ambulance to area hospitals, Briggs said. Four people were taken to Limestone Medical Center in nearby Groesbeck.

Storm damage was also reported near the central Texas town of Hico, about 68 miles southwest of Fort Worth. Authorities said some power lines were down.

"The funnel came down, it touched the ground and then it faded out," said Kyle Davault of Arlington, who was fishing nearby. "And we just kept watching it. It came back down again and touched again."

Strong winds damaged part of a hospital and knocked out power to several homes and businesses in the East Texas town of Atlanta.

A truck carrying a group of college students ran off a highway bridge early yesterday and fell 30 feet to a concrete embankment, killing all five people inside.

The two men and three women were students at Abilene Christian University, located about 110 miles west of where the crash occurred, school spokeswoman Wendy Kilmer said. Their names were not released, pending notification of their relatives.

Trooper Gary M. Rozzell with the Texas Department of Public Safety said the five died when their truck went off Interstate 20 near Weatherford, about 50 miles west of Fort Worth, and landed on its roof shortly after 6:30 a.m. The cause of the crash is under investigation.

Kilmer said officials at the school of 4,700 students were deciding what kind of memorial to hold and when.

An America West flight was diverted to Wichita and grounded overnight because of a "suspicious wire" on a bathroom floor that officials later learned came off a toilet paper holder, an airport spokeswoman said yesterday.

The plane was heading from Washington to Phoenix on Saturday when an air marshal found the wire in the bathroom underneath a compartment that holds carbon dioxide, spokeswoman Latricia Harper said. The door to the compartment was open.

"The placement of it and the appearance of it was enough to give the air marshal some suspicion to check it out further," she said.

The flight was diverted to Mid-Continent Airport in Wichita, where it landed at 6:45 p.m. and its 130 passengers were evacuated, Harper said.

Wichita Police bomb squad and the Explosive Ordinance Division from McConnell Air Force Base inspected the plane but found nothing but the original wire, Harper said.