HOUSTON (AP) — Severe storms with damaging winds and baseball-sized hail slammed Texas Tuesday, leaving more than a million businesses and homes without power as much of the United States was recovering from severe weather, including tornadoes, which killed at least 24 people during this period. on the Memorial Day holiday weekend.
Widespread outages were reported in North Texas, which includes Dallas and Fort Worth, where an oppressive early-season heat wave added to the misery. More than 300,000 customers in Dallas County alone lost power Tuesday as outages spread to rural East Texas, according to PowerOutage.us.
State voters second round of elections I found dozens of polling stations without electricity. 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 situation,” Jenkins said Tuesday.
Around Houston, cars crawled across flooded highways and more than 300,000 customers were without power in the area, including parts still recovering. hurricane winds earlier this month.
Destructive storms Over the weekend, deaths occurred in Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Kentucky, North Carolina and Virginia. Meanwhile, in the Midwest, an unusual weather phenomenon called “gustnado” It looks like a small tornado caused some drama at a west Michigan lake over the weekend.
Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator Deanne Criswell will visit Arkansas on Wednesday as the Biden administration continues to assess the damage caused by the weekend’s tornadoes.
Seven people were killed Cooke County, Texas, from a tornado that ripped through a mobile home park Saturday, officials said, and seven additional 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 after a tree branch fell into his tent while he was camping.
The governor of Kentucky. Andy Beshear said five people died in his state in storms that hit near where a devastating tornado swarm killed 81 people in December 2021. lost their home for the second time on the same land where a tornado leveled their home less than three years ago.
About 150,000 homes and businesses lost power midday Tuesday in Louisiana, Kentucky, Arkansas, West Virginia and Missouri.
It was a dark month, marked by tornadoes and severe weather in the central part of the country.
Tornadoes in Iowa last week are gone at least five dead and dozens of injured. Storms killed eight people in Houston this month. April had the second most tornadoes registered in the country. Storms come like climate change generally contributes to the severity of storms around the world.
Late May is the peak of tornado season, but recent storms have been unusually violent, producing very strong tornadoes, said Victor Gensini, a professor of meteorology at Northern Illinois University.
“Over the weekend we had a lot of warm, humid air, a lot of gasoline, a lot of fuel for these storms. And we also had a very strong jet stream. This jet stream helped provide the wind shear needed for these types of tornadoes,” Gensini said.
Harold Brooks, senior scientist at the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma, said the series of tornadoes over the past two months was due to a persistent atmosphere of warm, humid air.
This air sits at the northern end of a thermal dome, bringing temperatures typically seen at the height of summer until late May.
The heat index – a combination of air temperature and humidity to indicate how heat is felt by the human body – has reached triple digits in parts of South Texas and is expected to stay there for several days .
For more on recent tornado reports, see The Associated Press Tornado Tracker.
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Associated Press journalists from across the country contributed to this report, including Paul J. Weber, Ken Miller, Jennifer McDermott, Sarah Brumfield, Kathy McCormack, Acacia Coronado, Jeffrey Collins, Bruce Schreiner and Julio Cortez.