A powerful line of thunderstorms barreled through North Texas on Thursday, bringing golf-ball size hail and winds of up to 70 miles per hour that toppled power lines and damaged homes.
A tornado watch was in effect on Thursday until 10 p.m. for more than nine million people in North Texas, including Dallas, and parts of southeast Oklahoma and southwest Arkansas. The National Weather Service said that “a few tornadoes” were likely for those areas, along with the threat of hail the size of apples and wind gusts up to 75 m.p.h.
As storms moved through the Dallas-Fort Worth area on Thursday night, strong wind gusts were recorded throughout the area.
The Weather Service issued several severe thunderstorm warnings for the area throughout the evening, warning of a “destructive storm.”
Throughout North Texas there were reports of wind damage to roofs and toppled power lines, according to the Weather Service. In McKinney, a suburb north of Dallas, the police said four tractor-trailers were blown over on a highway, and minor injuries were reported.
Images circulating on social media showed uprooted trees and fences that had blown over. In Little Elm, a town northwest of Dallas, winds toppled the facade of a supermarket onto vehicles parked outside the store, a town spokeswoman said. No one was injured.
“This has caused widespread structural damage,” Tom Bradshaw, a Weather Service meteorologist in Fort Worth, said. “We could hear the wind roaring outside. This was a really impressive event.”
At the Alamodome in San Antonio, a state high school basketball tournament was halted after the roof leaked, local news media reported.
More than 347,000 customers across Texas were without power, according to poweroutage.us. Mr. Bradshaw said the Weather Service’s office in Fort Worth also lost power, but emergency generators allowed meteorologists to continue working as storms moved through the area.
The Weather Service issued a number of tornado warnings throughout North Texas, including one for Dallas, but it was unclear whether any tornadoes had touched down.
There were reports of a possible tornado in Hopkins County in northeast Texas on Thursday, Mr. Bradshaw said, adding that the Weather Service might send a crew to evaluate the damage in the area.
With the threat of severe weather in the forecast, several school districts in North Texas canceled after-school activities on Thursday, including the Dallas and Fort Worth independent school districts.
A spokesman for the Dallas-based Southwest Airlines said that the airline made “proactive” changes to its Thursday night flight schedule because of the weather forecast. American Airlines said in a statement that it had canceled flights ahead of the storms. More than 400 flights into or out of Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport and Dallas Love Field Airport were canceled on Thursday, according to FlightAware, a flight-tracking website.
Storms moving through North Texas also prompted the Federal Aviation Administration to issue a temporary ground stop on Thursday at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport.
This region (sometimes called Ark-La-Tex) was under a “moderate risk” of severe storms, forecasters at the Storm Prediction Center said on Thursday. A moderate risk means forecasters believe that the storms that form in the area will be at a strength typically only experienced once a year, if that.
“Moderate risks and higher risks are saved for those days where it looks like an outbreak,” Mr. Nuttall said. “We get lots of severe weather days during the year, but we don’t typically have this great of confidence combined with the unusually strong storm system.”
These outlooks are typically only issued about a dozen times a year on average. This is only the second one issued this year. The last was issued this past Sunday when damaging winds and tornadoes tore through parts of Oklahoma.
Storms were expected to continue moving east into Louisiana and Arkansas. A tornado watch had been issued for more than one million people across both states. The Weather Service said a few tornadoes were likely in the area.
