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One person died as destructive storms brought baseball-sized hail to Texas.
Severe thunderstorms brought hurricane-force winds and destructive hail to Houston and the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area on Tuesday afternoon. More than 400,000 customers across the state were still without power as of Wednesday morning, according to utility tracking site PowerOutage.us. Just one day earlier, the storms had left more than 1 million people without power.
The storm also disrupted travel, with more than 500 flights delayed and about 350 canceled at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport on Tuesday, according to FlightAware.
A 16-year-old construction worker was killed when a home collapsed in Magnolia County and was buried under rubble, local media outlet KHOU 11 reported.
Officials said the house, which was under construction, collapsed when the storm caused its frame to shift, and the boy was already dead when rescuers pulled his body from the rubble.
The storm continued into the early hours of Wednesday morning, with the maximum wind gust recorded in the Dallas suburb of The Colony being 95 mph, according to the National Weather Service (NWS).
Officials said it could take days to repair widespread power outages, especially in hard-hit Dallas County.
“This weather event caused a significant number of downed power lines,” Grant Crews, a spokesman for utility company Oncor, said Tuesday.
“In many cases, it’s not just a simple repair, we’re looking at a complete rebuild of parts of the area.”
High winds damaged power lines and buildings and blew an American Airlines Flight 737-800 off a gate at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport on Tuesday morning.
As the high winds continued, reports emerged of an 18-wheeler truck overturning on a Texas highway and causing a multi-vehicle accident, local media WFAA reported.
Texas also held its primary runoff election on Tuesday, where voters will decide who will be the final candidate in November. Officials extended voting hours for the state’s runoff election by two hours after a power outage in the Dallas metropolitan area knocked power out at dozens of polling places.
At least 76 polling locations in four counties lost power because of the storm. Texas Tribune I will report.
“[The storm] “It involved a lot of people,” said Nicholas Solorzano, communications director for the Dallas County Elections Department. Tribune“Unfortunately, many of our locations, including schools and libraries, are still experiencing power outages.”
The storm arrived just two days after the region was hit by a weather phenomenon known as a derecho, a widespread, long-lasting storm accompanied by a line of fast-moving rainclouds and thunderstorms.
“Many people are again without power. We just got through the derecho about two weeks ago, but it’s very devastating and many are still trying to recover,” County Judge Lina Hidalgo, the top elected official in Harris County, which includes Houston, said in a video posted to social media late Tuesday.
Multiple tornadoes were reported across the state over the weekend, including one that struck Cook County, about 50 miles north of Dallas, on Saturday night. The dangerous storm killed seven people ahead of Memorial Day.
Sixteen more people were killed across the U.S. after severe thunderstorms and tornadoes struck multiple states over the holiday weekend.
The storms also disrupted travel over Memorial Day, canceling or delaying hundreds of flights across the country, and heavy rains also drenched much of Interstate 95, the main north-south highway connecting the East Coast to the Pacific.
