Damage is seen at a truck stop the morning after a tornado rolled through Valley View, Texas. Photo / AP
Damage is seen at a truck stop the morning after a tornado rolled through Valley View, Texas. Photo / AP
Powerful storms killed at least 15 people and left a wide trail of destruction on Sunday across Texas, Oklahoma and Arkansas after obliterating homes and destroying a truck stop where dozens sought shelter in a restroom.
The storms inflicted their worst damage in a region spanning from north of Dallas to the northwest corner of Arkansas, and the system threatened to bring more violent weather to other parts of the Midwest later in the day. By Monday, forecasters said, the greatest risk would shift to the east, covering a broad swath of the country from Alabama to near New York City.
Seven deaths were reported in Cooke County, Texas, near the Oklahoma border, where a tornado ploughed through a rural area near a mobile home park, officials said. Storms also killed two people and destroyed houses in Oklahoma, where the injured included guests at an outdoor wedding. Tens of thousands of residents were without power across the region.
“It’s just a trail of debris left. The devastation is pretty severe,” Cooke County Sheriff Ray Sappington told AP.
The dead included two children, ages 2 and 5, the sheriff said. The Texas county includes the small community of Valley View, which was among the hardest-hit areas. Three family members were found dead in one home, Sappington said.
Hugo Parra, who lives in Farmers Branch, north of Dallas, said he rode out the storm with 40 to 50 people in the bathroom of the truck stop near Valley View. The storm sheared the roof and walls off the building, mangling metal beams and leaving battered cars in the parking lot.
“A firefighter came to check on us and he said, ‘You’re very lucky,’” Parra said. “The best way to describe this is the wind tried to rip us out of the bathrooms.”
Several people were transported to hospitals by ambulance and helicopter in Denton County, Texas, also north of Dallas. But officials did not immediately know the full extent of the injuries.
At least five people were killed in Arkansas, including a 26-year-old woman who was found dead outside a destroyed home in Olvey, a small community in Boone County, according to Daniel Bolen of the county’s emergency management office. Another person died in Benton County, and two more bodies were found in Marion County. In Oklahoma, two people died in Mayes County, east of Tulsa, officials said.
Elsewhere, a man was killed Sunday in Louisville, Kentucky, when a tree fell on him, police said. Louisville Mayor Craig Greenburg confirmed it was a storm-related death on social media.
A deadly series of storms
The destruction continued a grim month of deadly severe weather in the nation’s midsection.
Tornadoes in Iowa this week left at least five people dead and dozens injured. The deadly twisters have spawned during a historically bad season for tornadoes, at a time when climate change contributes to the severity of storms around the world. April had the second-highest number of tornadoes on record in the country.
Meteorologists and authorities had issued urgent warnings to seek cover as the storms marched across the region late Saturday and into Sunday morning. “If you are in the path of this storm take cover now!” the National Weather Service office in Norman, Oklahoma, posted on X, formerly known as Twitter.
Harold Brooks, senior research scientist researcher at the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, said a persistent weather pattern of warm, moist air is to blame for the string of tornadoes over the past two months.
Brooks recommended that travellers passing through threatened areas over the Memorial Day weekend should have a plan for a weather emergency.
Travellers who have already chosen where to get food and other essentials “probably ought to be thinking about what could I do if there’s a dangerous situation to save my life”, Brooks said.
Homes destroyed, roads blocked
Daybreak began to reveal the full scope of the devastation.
Residents awoke on Sunday to overturned cars and collapsed garages. Some residents could be seen pacing and assessing the damage. Nearby, neighbours sat on the foundation of a wrecked home.
In Valley View, near the truck stop, the storms ripped the roofs off homes and blew out windows. Clothing, insulation, bits of plastic and other pieces of debris were wrapped around kilometres of barbed wire fence line surrounding grazing land in the rural area.
Kevin Dorantes, 20, was in nearby Carrollton when he learned the tornado was bearing down on the Valley View neighbourhood where he lived with his father and brother. He called the two of them and told them to take cover in the windowless bathroom, where they rode out the storm and survived unharmed.
Some of his Dorantes’ neighbours weren’t so lucky.
As he wandered through the neighbourhood of downed power lines and devastated houses, he came upon a family whose home was reduced to a pile of splintered rubble. A father and son were trapped under debris, and friends and neighbours raced to get them out, Dorantes said.
“They were conscious but severely injured,” Dorantes said. “The father’s leg was snapped.”
Damage is seen at a truck stop the morning after a tornado rolled through Valley View, Texas. Photo / AP
Widespread power outages
The severe weather knocked out power for hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses in the path of the storms.
More than 100,000 customers in Arkansas were without power on Sunday. In neighbouring Missouri, more than 100,000 were also without power along the southern state border. Texas reported 57,000 outages while 7400 were reported in Oklahoma, according to the tracking website poweroutage.us.
Inaccessible roads and downed power lines in Oklahoma also led officials in the town of Claremore, near Tulsa, to announce on social media that the city was “shut down” due to the damage.
More severe weather in forecast
The system causing the latest severe weather was expected to move east over the rest of the holiday weekend.
The Indianapolis 500 started four hours late after a strong storm pushed into the area, forcing Indianapolis Motor Speedway officials to evacuate about 125,000 race fans. The weather put a year of planning in jeopardy when the band of thunderstorms swept through ahead of pre-race festivities.
More severe storms were predicted in Illinois, Missouri and Kentucky.
The risk of severe weather moves into North Carolina and Virginia on Monday, forecasters said.
