The first aerial photographs of a north Texas town have revealed the devastating trail of destruction left after 10 massive tornadoes barreled through the state on Wednesday night, leaving six dead and more than 100 people injured.
Homes were flattened, trucks were tossed into the air and trees were ripped from the ground after the massive storms - including one measuring a mile wide - ravaged towns in what Hood County Sheriff Roger Deeds described as a 'nightmare' situation.
Seven people remain missing and more than 250 have been left homeless after the tornadoes hit in the early evening, with many properties being crushed with people still inside.
The worst damage inflicted by the twisters - which were the deadliest to hit the country so far this year - was in Granbury, a town of 8,000 people around 35 miles southwest of Dallas-Fort Worth.
Elizabeth Tovar, who lives in Granbury, said she saw fist-sized hail begin to fall, prompting her and her family to seek shelter in their bathroom as the tornadoes hit around 8pm.
'We were all hugging in the bathtub and that's when it started happening. I heard glass shattering and I knew my house was going,' Tovar said. 'We looked up and the whole ceiling was gone.'
Frank Gamez, who works in construction in the town, said he found a friend dead on Wednesday night as he and other people searched the neighborhood.
'We lost one of our friends,' Gamez said. 'We found him laying on the ground.'
Hood County Sheriff Roger Deeds said early on Thursday morning that he hoped the death toll in the area would hold at six, but authorities warned it could rise as seven people are still missing.
All six of the people confirmed killed were adults and were found in Rancho Brazos, a neighborhood of around 110 mostly single family homes on the fringe of Granbury.
Deeds added that crews were continuing to go from house to house to look for people trapped, injured or dead among the rubble of demolished homes.
Rescue teams have been 'over and over and over again through the area,' he said. 'I'm pretty confident we haven't left people behind but we're still checking.'
'The main concern is life safety and making sure we tend to that, and their pets too,' he said, adding that the Humane Society were coming to the area to rescue pets wandering the streets.
Utilities said about 20,000 homes and businesses were without power early on Thursday.
Matt Zavadsky, a spokesman for MedStar Mobile Healthcare, an agency that provides ambulance service to the region, said about 100 people were injured in the Granbury twister.
Some of the injured had undergone amputations while others had minor bumps and bruises.
Lt. Kathy Jividen, a spokeswoman for the sheriff's office, confirmed numerous injures, 'some critical', after at least three tornadoes touched down, leveling most of the 120 homes in the area.
Many of the injured were being treated at Lake Granbury Medical Center, while 17 people were taken to Fort Worth hospitals.
Local hospitals called in extra staff members to cope with the injured, while schools and other buildings were being used to treat victims, officials said.
Ahead of the storms, meteorologists had said it was too cool for there to be a threat of tornadoes.
Residents in Montague County were alerted about 15 to 30 minutes before the storm struck, and in Hood County a warning was issued 26 minutes before the tornado touched down, according to Mark Wiley, emergency response meteorologist at the agency's Forth Worth office.
This is actually longer than the national average warning of between 10 and 12 minutes, according to the National Weather Service.
Wiley added that the rating of the deadly tornado in Granbury would not be determined until later on Thursday, but that 'it was a strong tornado just based on the damage'.
In what could bring even more heartache for the residents of Texas, he warned that more severe storms could be coming to the state, as well as parts of Arkansas and northern Louisiana tonight.
But he added the possible tornadoes would be in northeast Texas, not in the area already hit.
Most of the damage was in two housing subdivisions at the edge of the town of Granbury, about 35 miles (56km) southwest of Fort Worth. Another tornado hit the small town of Millsap, about 40 miles west of Fort Worth, with roof damage to homes and barns.
'The houses are no more. They're all leveled,' one resident in Granbury told NBC.
'The house started shaking,' another witness added. 'We were in a closet. You could hear it - it sounded like a train going off. It was scary.'
The twister in Granbury was part of a system of severe thunderstorms that spawned several tornadoes across North Texas, dropping large hail in some areas. Another mile-wide tornado that tore through part of Cleburne, about 25 miles southeast of Granbury.
'We haven't had a bad one like this for a while. It's definitely a nightmare,' Deeds said to USA Today.
One witness told NBCDFW.com that the storm system intensified around 7.30 p.m. and the tornado struck at around 8 p.m.
'It started hailing and so we opened up the curtains and stood in the middle of the house,' one resident told CBS 11. 'Then all of a sudden things just started swirling.'
'You could see stuff going all through the air,' said another. 'At the top of the hill, you could tell where the tornado went through directly cause it’s just wiped out. Trees gone. Houses completely demolished.'
Rancho Brazos Estates resident Allacia Jenny, 22, said she witnessed devastation in her neighborhood. 'The house across from mine looked like it was destroyed,' she said.
Toppled large trees littered her yard and power lines were 'all over the place,' she said.
At Stumpy's Lakeside Grill in Lake Granbury, diners and workers ducked under tables as the wind gusts and hail started, but nobody was injured, said Eric Martinez, a cook.
They saw several homeowners' boat docks across the lake 'just get torn apart,' he said.
'The boat docks just flew off, and they're actually gone,' Martinez said, while boards and other debris landed in some yards.
The restaurant didn't appear to sustain any damage, but cars in the parking lot had dents from the large hail, he said.
Another tornado, which was a mile wide, tore through Cleburne, a city of about 30,000 about 25 miles southeast of Granbury.
The city's mayor, Scott Cain, said on Thursday that no one was killed or seriously hurt in the tornado, but seven people suffered minor injuries and that dozens of homes were damaged.
In one neighborhood, the tornado picked up a trucking company trailer that had been parked on the street and dropped it onto a nearby car and garage.
Hail as large as grapefruit also pelted the area around Mineral Wells on Wednesday evening. A police dispatcher reported only minor damage.
The Red Cross said it believes the worst-hit areas are Hood County, Johnson, Parker, Wise and Montague.
The tornado is the deadliest so far this year. The season typically starts in the Gulf Coast states in late winter, moves north with the warming weather, peaks around May and trails off by July.
Several deadly tornadoes have struck in recent years.
In March 2012, at least 39 people were killed in a chain of tornadoes from the Midwest to the Gulf of Mexico. The following month, at least six people were killed by a twister in an Oklahoma town.
In May 2011, a massive tornado struck Joplin, Missouri, killing 161 people and damaging or destroying 7,500 homes.
Source : dailymail
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