400K remain without power in Texas after deadly storms bring hurricane-force winds and hail to Lone Star state
Millions are left without power and hundreds of flights cancelled
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Your support makes all the difference.One person is dead after destructive storms brought baseball-sized hail to Texas.
A severe thunderstorm brought hurricane-force winds and damaging hail to the Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan areas on Tuesday afternoon. More than 400,000 customers in the state are still without power as of Wednesday morning, according to utility tracker PowerOutage.us. Just a day prior, more than one million people were without power due to the storms.
The storm also disrupted travel, with more than 500 flights delayed and some 350 canceled at Dallas-Fort Worth International on Tuesday, according to FlightAware.
A sixteen-year-old construction worker died after a Magnolia County home collapsed around him, trapping him under the rubble, local outlet KHOU 11 reports.
Officials said the home, which was under construction, collapsed because the framing shifted during the storm. The teen was already dead when rescue crews pulled his body from the wreckage.
Storms lasted through early Wednesday morning, the National Weather Service (NWS) said. The highest wind gust recorded was 95 miles per hour in The Colony, a suburb of Dallas.
Officials said the widespread power outages could take days to repair, particularly in hard-hit Dallas County.
“We did have a significant number of downed lines because of this weather event,” Grant Cruise, a spokesperson for utility company Oncor, said on Tuesday.
“In many cases, it’s not going to be simple repairs, we’re looking at complete reconstruction for parts of our area.”
The heavy winds, which damaged power lines and buildings, were so strong on Tuesday morning that they blew American Airlines flight 737-800 away from its gate at Dallas-Forth Worth International.
As high winds persisted, reports surfaced of an overturned 18-wheeler truck and multiple car wrecks across Texas highways, local outlet WFAA reports.
Texas also hosted a primary run-off election on Tuesday. Voters will decide the final candidates for November’s ballot. The power outages in the Dallas metro area prompted officials to extend polls by two hours in the state’s runoff elections after dozens of polling places lost power.
At least 76 polling places in four counties were without power due to the storms, The Texas Tribune reports.
“[The storm] kind of caught a lot of people on their way,” Nicholas Solorzano, communications manager at the Dallas County Elections Department, told the Tribune. “Unfortunately, many of our locations are still experiencing power outages like schools and libraries.”
The storm arrrived just two days after the area was walloped by a weather event known as a derecho – a widespread, long-lived windstorm that’s associated with a band of rapidly moving showers or thunderstorms.
“A lot of people are without power again. We just got through with derecho a couple week ago, which was extremely devastating and many are still trying to recover from,” Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo, the top elected official in the county home to Houston, said in a video posted on social media late Tuesday.
Over the weekend, multiple tornadoes were reported in the state with one plowing through Cooke County on Saturday night, approximately 50 miles north of Dallas. The dangerous storms left seven people dead ahead of Memorial Day.
Another 16 people died across the US from severe thunderstorms and tornadoes that pelted several states over the holiday weekend.
Those storms also disrupted Memorial Day travel, causing hundreds of canceled and delayed flights throughout the country. Heavy rain pelted much of Interstate 95 as well, the main north-south freeway that connects the East Coast.
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