Strong storms with damaging winds and baseball-sized hail lashed Texas on Tuesday, leaving more than a million businesses and homes without power as much of the US recovered. severe weather, including tornadoeskilling at least 24 people in seven states over the Memorial Day holiday weekend.
Voters in the second round of state elections found some polling stations without power. About 100 voting sites in Dallas County were taken offline. Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins declared a disaster area and noted that some nursing homes were using generators. “This will ultimately be a multi-day power outage,” Jenkins said Tuesday.
Severe weather and heavy rain were forecast for the Dallas area Tuesday evening. Severe thunderstorms also barreled toward Houston, where officials warned that winds of up to 75 mph could cause damage less than two weeks after hurricane-force winds knocked out power to more than 800,000 homes and businesses.
Karen Warren/Houston Chronicle via Getty Images
In the Midwest, an unusual weather phenomenon called a “gustnado,” which resembles a small tornado, created some dramatic moments in a western Michigan lake this weekend.
Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator Deanne Criswell will travel to Arkansas on Wednesday as the Biden administration continues to assess damage from the weekend tornadoes.
Seven people, including two young children, were killed in Cooke County, Texas, as a result of a tornado that tore through a mobile home park on Saturday, officials said, and seven deaths were reported across Arkansas.
Two people died in Mayes County, Oklahoma, east of Tulsa, authorities said. Among the injured were guests at an outdoor wedding. A Missouri man died Sunday in Sikeston after a tree branch fell on his tent while he was camping.
Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear said five people in his state had died in storms that struck near where a devastating swarm of tornadoes killed 81 people in December 2021. One family lost their home for the second time on the same property where a tornado leveled their home. house less than three years ago.
An 18-year-old woman was killed in North Carolina’s Clay County after a large tree fell on her trailer. Authorities also confirmed one death in Nelson County, Virginia.
In addition to the death toll over the Memorial Day weekend, one person died Tuesday in Magnolia, Texas, about 40 miles north of Houston, when a home under construction collapsed during a storm, the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office said.
Ryan Hermens/Lexington Herald-Leader/Tribune News Service via Getty Images
About 150,000 homes and businesses were without electricity Tuesday afternoon in Louisiana, Kentucky, Arkansas, West Virginia and Missouri.
It’s been a grim month with tornadoes and severe weather in the middle of the country.
Tornadoes in Iowa left at least five dead and dozens injured last week. Storms killed eight people in Houston earlier this month. April had the second highest number of tornadoes registered in the country. The storms come as climate change in general is contributing to the severity of storms around the world.
Late May is the peak of tornado season, but recent storms have been exceptionally intense and have produced very strong tornadoes, said Victor Gensini, a professor of meteorology at Northern Illinois University.
“This weekend we’ve had a lot of hot and humid air, a lot of gasoline, a lot of fuel for these storms. And we also had a very strong jet stream. That jet stream helped provide the wind shear necessary for these types of tornadoes,” Gensini said.
BRANDON BELL/Getty Images
Harold Brooks, a senior scientist at the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma, said a persistent pattern of warm, moist air is to blame for the string of tornadoes over the past two months.
That air is at the northern edge of a heat dome and produces temperatures normally seen at the height of summer until the end of May.
The heat index — a combination of air temperature and humidity to indicate what the heat feels like to the human body — reached triple digits in parts of South Texas and was expected to stay there for several days.
