Tornadoes and storms leave a trail of destruction across parts of Texas, Oklahoma and Arkansas.
Severe storms across the United States killed at least 11 people, including two children, and left a wide trail of destruction in Texas, Oklahoma and Arkansas after destroying homes and destroying a truck stop where drivers were taking shelter.
Seven deaths were reported in Cooke County, Texas, near the Oklahoma border, where a tornado Saturday night touched down in a rural area near a mobile home park, officials said.
In Oklahoma, at least two people died after a tornado ripped through Mayes County on Saturday night, county emergency management chief Johnny Janzen told Tulsa’s Fox News affiliate.
And in northern Arkansas, two people died in storms in the early hours of Sunday, local authorities confirmed.
“It’s just a trail of debris. The devastation is quite severe,” Cooke County Sheriff Ray Sappington told the Associated Press on Sunday.
The dead included two children, ages two and five, the sheriff said.
Hugo Parra, who lives in Farmers Branch, north of Dallas, said he rode out the storm with about 40 to 50 people in a gas station bathroom.
“A firefighter came to see us and said, ‘You guys are so lucky,’” Parra said. “The best way to describe it is that the wind tried to rip us out of the bathrooms.”
Several people were transported to hospitals by ambulance and helicopter in Denton County, Texas, also north of Dallas. But authorities did not immediately know the full extent of the injuries.
Elsewhere in Denton County, a tornado toppled tractor trailers and disrupted traffic on Interstate 35, county spokeswoman Dawn Cobb said. A shelter has been opened in the rural town of Sanger.
At least 60 to 80 people were inside a highway truck stop, some of them seeking shelter, when the storm passed, but there were no serious injuries, Sappington said.
The storms also caused damage in Oklahoma, where guests at an outdoor wedding were injured. About 375,000 people were also without power Sunday morning in Texas, Missouri, Oklahoma, Kansas and Arkansas, according to the website PowerOutage.us.
Meteorologists and authorities issued urgent warnings to seek cover as storms passed through the region overnight. “If you are in the path of this storm, take cover now!” the National Weather Service office in Norman, Oklahoma, posted on social media platform X.
April and May were busy months with tornadoes, especially in the Midwest. Iowa was hit hard last week when a deadly tornado devastated Greenfield. Other storms caused flooding and wind damage in other parts of the state.
More severe weather was forecast for the Great Plains region on Sunday, with tornado warnings still in place in many places. But in Texas, the National Weather Service said the threat has diminished.
“It will be rebuilt,” Sappington told ABC affiliate WFAA. “It’s Texas.”
This story originally appeared on Aljazeera.com read the full story
