Storms leave widespread outages across Texas, cleanup continues after deadly weekend across U.S.

Severe storms with devastating winds and baseball-sized hail pummeled Texas on Tuesday, leaving more than a million businesses and homes without power as much of the U.S. recovered. severe weather, including tornadoesthat killed at least 24 people in seven states over the Memorial Day holiday weekend.

Voters in the second round of state elections found some polling places without power. Approximately 100 polling locations in Dallas County have been shut down. Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins declared it a disaster area and noted that some nursing homes were using generators. “Ultimately, it will be a multi-day power outage situation,” Jenkins said Tuesday.

More severe weather and heavy rain were forecast for the Dallas area Tuesday night. Severe storms also hit Houston, where authorities warned that winds as strong as 70 mph could cause damage less than two weeks after hurricane-force winds knocked out power to more than 800,000 homes and businesses.

In the Midwest, an unusual weather phenomenon called a “gustnado,” which looks like a small tornado, brought some dramatic moments to a lake in western Michigan over the weekend.

Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator Deanne Criswell will travel to Arkansas on Wednesday as the Biden administration continues to assess damage from the weekend’s tornadoes.

Seven people, including two young children, were killed in Cooke County, Texas, in a tornado that ripped through a mobile home park on Saturday, authorities said, and seven deaths were reported across Arkansas.

Two people died in Mayes County, Oklahoma, east of Tulsa, authorities said. The injured included guests at an outdoor wedding. A Missouri man died Sunday in Sikeston after a tree branch fell on his tent while he was camping.

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear said five people died in his state during storms that struck near where a devastating swarm of tornadoes killed 81 people in December 2021. A family lost their home for the second time on the same land where a tornado hit. destroyed their home less than three years ago.

An 18-year-old woman was killed in Clay County, North Carolina after a large tree landed on her trailer. Authorities also confirmed one death in Nelson County, Virginia.

In addition to the death toll over Memorial Day weekend, in Magnolia, Texas, about 40 miles (64 kilometers) north of Houston, one person died Tuesday when a home under construction collapsed during a storm, the County Sheriff’s Office said. Montgomery County.

Approximately 150,000 homes and businesses were without power at noon Tuesday in Louisiana, Kentucky, Arkansas, West Virginia and Missouri.

It was a dark month of tornadoes and severe weather in the central region of the country.

Tornadoes in Iowa last week left at least five dead and dozens injured. Storms killed eight people in Houston earlier this month. April had the second highest number of tornadoes registered in the country. The storms occur as climate change generally contributes to the severity of storms around the world.

The end of May is the peak of tornado season, but recent storms have been unusually violent, producing very strong tornadoes, said Victor Gensini, a meteorology professor 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. providing 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 a persistent pattern of warm, moist air is to blame for the series of tornadoes over the past two months.

This air is at the northern end of a heat dome, bringing temperatures normally seen in the height of summer until the end of May.

The heat index — a combination of air temperature and humidity to indicate how the human body feels heat — reached triple digits in parts of South Texas and was expected to stay that way for several days.