Wild Weather Leaves 1 Dead in Texas; Tornados, Flooding Reported

May 11, 2015

Several tornadoes ripped through the northern part of Texas, leaving one person dead and others unaccounted for in a sparsely populated area over the weekend, authorities said.

One of the tornadoes on Saturday shattered homes in a rural area south of Cisco, a town about 100 miles west of Fort Worth, Eastland County Judge Rex Fields said.

“The homes that I’ve seen, there are just maybe one or two walls standing,” Fields, who also serves as the county’s emergency services coordinator, told The Associated Press.

Fields said one person was killed and there were likely other injuries. Authorities were going house to house to assess the damage, but that proved difficult amid the heavy rainfall.

The extent of injuries or fatalities also wasn’t immediately clear in the town of Burkburnett, about 15 miles north of Wichita Falls, where a second tornado touched down.

Thunderstorms and severe weather have forced significant delays and cancellations at both Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport and Dallas Love Field Airport.

About 200 flights total at the two airports were canceled Sunday.

Flights leaving and landing at DFW Airport are being delayed by an average of more than 1 hour, according to flight tracking website FlightAware. Arrivals at Love Field — a primary hub of Southwest Airlines — were being delayed an average of about 30 minutes.

The weekend storms also dumped heavy rain over northern Texas, creating flash flooding conditions and swift water rescues in Krum and Sanger, Texas, the Weather Channel reported. More than 12 inches of rain was estimated to have fallen just southeast of Corsicana, Texas. A total of 10.02 inches of rain was measured in Corsicana during a 5-hour period on Sunday.

Elsewhere in the U.S., storms brought heavy rain and quarter-sized hail to parts of southwest Oklahoma on Saturday afternoon, but meteorologists said a tornado threat there had diminished as the hours wore on Sunday.

Parts of western Kansas also were hit by severe weather ripe for tornadoes. In Kansas City, in the eastern part of the state, a band of rain halted NASCAR’s Sprint Cup race at Kansas Speedway.

Twin weather systems stretching from the Carolinas to California produced an unseasonably early tropical storm in the Atlantic and a late-season snowstorm in the Rocky Mountains. Tropical Storm Ana was reported early Sunday to be just off the coast of South Carolina, weakening with top sustained winds of 45 mph.

Topics Catastrophe Natural Disasters Texas Windstorm Flood Aviation Kansas

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