Tornado in north Texas destroys several buildings and displaces residents

The whir of chain saws and the beeping of utility trucks were the most prominent sounds Wednesday afternoon around Mineral Wells, Texas, after a tornado the previous night ripped through a section of the city.

In one industrial sector of Mineral Wells, a town of about 15,000 residents west of the Dallas-Fort Worth area, roofs had been sheared off buildings, and other structures had been reduced to piles of what looked like matchsticks. But the destruction appeared limited to an area of commercial properties that were largely empty.

Most residential homes in the area were unscathed, and no deaths were reported, though at least five people were hospitalized with non-life-threatening injuries, and many residents were displaced, city officials said.

Christopher Hester, 33, said that he was sitting in his living room with his wife Tuesday afternoon when their front door suddenly burst open. He said they immediately took cover in the hallway of their home.

“I looked up, and I just saw my roof flying up in the air,” Hester said. “By the grace of God, we are alive.”

On Wednesday, Hester could not help but laugh at what he called the irony of losing his home. He and his wife had just moved into the duplex three weeks ago. On Tuesday, he said, he had just finished unpacking the second-to-last box from their move.

“But hey, we’re alive,” he said. “We made it out of that catastrophic event.”

Hester said he and his wife did not incur major injuries, suffering only a few scrapes and bruises.

Regan Wallace Johnson, the mayor of Mineral Wells, said that given the destruction, it was “amazing” that residents had made it through the tornado without serious injuries.

As of Wednesday, officials did not have a precise estimate of how many people had been displaced. Johnson said city officials were also working to determine how many people’s jobs could be affected by damage to their workplaces.

The debris was part of the trail of damage left by severe weather that has swept the central United States since last week, damaging homes and cars, flooding neighborhoods and knocking out power for thousands from Texas to Michigan to Kentucky. Over the weekend, a thunderstorm produced a tornado that hit towns an hour’s drive north of Mineral Wells, leaving two dead, according to officials in Wise and Parker counties.

Thunderstorms that unleash a destructive combination of hail, tornadoes, heavy rain or strong winds can occur nationwide anytime. But this is the time of year when they are most common, as a sometimes daily parade of storm systems moves across the central part of the country. Predicting when, exactly, a typical springtime storm will turn into something more dangerous can be difficult.

Since Thursday, parts of the Plains and the South have recorded more than 50 reports of tornadoes, including one that destroyed homes and damaged an Air Force base in Enid, Oklahoma.

On Tuesday, baseball-size hail was reported in North Texas and parts of Missouri, where the state highway patrol posted photos of several squad cars with shattered windshields. East of Mineral Wells, in Weatherford, Texas, the National Vietnam War Museum reported that its property had sustained “significant damage,” including to some aircraft that sit outside the museum.

Severe winds also whipped through the Ozarks, killing a 21-year-old emu at the Dickerson Park Zoo in Springfield, Missouri. Another member of the zoo’s avian family, a male rhea, a large flightless bird, was being tended to for injuries, the zoo said.

The harsh weather threat was expected to lessen Wednesday but still posed potential hazards, especially for parts of the South. Forecasters at the Storm Prediction Center said the most severe storms were expected over parts of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. The primary threats include damaging winds and large hail, with the potential for isolated large hail, exceeding 2 inches in diameter, in areas of Texas.

This was good news – for now – in Mineral Wells.

But as crews were beginning the recovery efforts, city officials said that a curfew would be enforced overnight in the part of town where workers were hustling to restore power.

“A lot of this area is still not safe,” Johnson said.

Allison Prater, a National Weather Service meteorologist, said that survey crews were working to determine the path of the tornado and how long it may have been on the ground. An early review of the damage helped meteorologists determine that winds from the tornado had reached at least 145 mph.

Tim Denison, chief of the Mineral Wells Police Department, said it was still raining Tuesday afternoon when he arrived at a stretch of industrial buildings that had been badly damaged by the storm.

There was so much destruction that he didn’t know where to start, he said. “It was devastating to pull up and see that and not know if people were inside those buildings that were collapsed,” he said.

It turned out to be only a handful of people – all of whom had gotten out by themselves or with minimal assistance, he said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.