Strong storms that brought damaging winds and baseball-sized hail hit central and northern Texas during the Memorial Day weekend, leaving one person dead and more than 800,000 homes and businesses without power as much of the US recovered from extreme heat and tornadoes.
Widespread outages were reported across a wide swath of storm-weary Texas, where an oppressive, early-season heatwave added to the misery. Voters in the state’s runoff elections found dozens of polling places without power. Dallas county said it would keep polls open two hours later because of the outages on Tuesday.
Around Houston, cars crawled through flooded highways and more than 300,000 customers were without power in the area, which includes parts still recovering from hurricane-force winds earlier this month.
The local fire department said one worker died in a collapse of three homes under construction in the Houston suburb of Magnolia. The fire division chief, Jason Herrman, said no one else is believed to be in the area, but they were still clearing the scene on Tuesday evening.
An East Houston school district issued a shelter-in-place order and directed buses with students back to their campuses in the afternoon until the weather subsided.
Destructive storms over the weekend caused deaths in Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Kentucky, North Carolina and Virginia. Meanwhile in the midwest, an unusual weather phenomenon called a “gustnado” that looks like a small tornado brought some dramatic moments to a western Michigan lake over the weekend.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency administrator, Deanne Criswell, will travel to Arkansas on Wednesday as the Biden administration continues assessing the damage from the weekend tornadoes.
In Florida, several cities broke heat records during the Memorial Day weekend.
According to the National Weather Service Miami, the city of West Palm Beach reached a daily record high of 97F (36C) on Monday, breaking the previous record high of 96F set in 1928.
Other Florida cities and locations also set record daily temperatures. The highest temperature at the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood international airport clocked in at 96F, two degrees more than the previous record high of 94F, set in 1963.
Miami, which welcomed hundreds of visitors for its Memorial Day celebration, also saw a record high temperature of 96F. The previous high of 94F was set in 1949.
Melbourne and Fort Pierce, located on Florida’s east coast, both saw a record high of 98F on Sunday. In Melbourne, the record high tied for the highest recorded temperature in the month of May, the National Weather Service Melbourne reported.
Texas also faced intense heat across the holiday weekend, with parts of the south seeing triple-digit temperatures and the heat index, which measures what the temperature feels like, hitting 120F, NBC reported.
Several southern Texas cities, including Corpus Christi, will be under a heat advisory warning starting at noon CDT and lasting until 8pm as the heat index is forecast to hit 114F, the National Weather Service announced.
Seven people, including four children, were killed after a tornado swept through multiple counties in northern Texas on Saturday, NBCDFW reported, including a mother and her two children who were killed when a tornado flipped their mobile home. An additional seven deaths were reported across Arkansas.
The Texas governor, Greg Abbott, signed a disaster declaration on Sunday to help affected residents, as more than 100 people were injured amid the severe storms and more than 370 homes damaged.
During Sunday remarks, Abbott added that he expected reports of damaged property to increase.
More than 800,000 people are without power in Texas, according to poweroutage.us, which tracks power outages across the US. Most of the outages are in Dallas county, which was hit by severe storms, CNN reported.
Two people died in Mayes county, Oklahoma, east of Tulsa, authorities said. The injured included guests at an outdoor wedding. A Missouri man died on Sunday after a tree limb fell on to his tent as he was camping.
Kentucky’s governor, Andy Beshear, said five people had died in his state during storms that struck close to where a devastating swarm of twisters killed 81 people in December 2021. One family lost their home for a second time on the same lot where a twister leveled their house less than three years ago.
It has been a grim month of tornadoes and severe weather in the nation’s midsection.
Tornadoes in Iowa last week left at least five people dead and dozens injured. Storms killed eight people in Houston this month. April had the second-highest number of tornadoes on record in the country. The storms come as the climate crisis contributes in general to the severity of storms around the world.
Late May is the peak of tornado season, but the recent storms have been exceptionally violent, producing very strong tornadoes, said Victor Gensini, a meteorology professor at Northern Illinois University.
“Over the weekend, we’ve had a lot of hot and humid air, a lot of gasoline, a lot of fuel for these storms. And we’ve had a really strong jet stream as well. That jet stream has been aiding in providing the wind shear necessary for these types of tornadoes,” Gensini said.
