One dead as extreme storm in Texas brings golf ball sized hail

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One person died as storms brought golf ball-sized hail to Texas, leaving more than one million residents without power.

Hurricane force winds and damaging hail blew severe thunders into Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan areas on Tuesday afternoon. More than 1 million customers in the state were without power at 3pm local time, according to utility tracker PowerOutage.us.

Hundreds of flights have been cancelled and delayed including at Dallas-Fort Worth International, according to FlightAware.

Storms are expected to last through early Wednesday morning, the National Weather Service (NWS) said. Wind gusts could exceed 75 miles per hour in parts of southeastern Texas and tornadoes will be possible in southern Texas until 1am local time on Wednesday.

Hail in the area could exceed two inches in diameter on Tuesday night, reaching the size of a tennis ball or baseball. At that size, hail can severely damage parked cars and roof shingles.

Officials said the widespread power outages could take days to repair.

“We did have a significant number of downed lines because of this weather event,” Grant Cruise, a spokesperson for utility company Oncor, said on Tuesday.

“In many cases, it’s not going to be simple repairs, we’re looking at complete reconstruction for parts of our area.”

The heavy winds, which damaged power lines and buildings, were so strong on Tuesday morning they blew American Airlines flight 737-800 away from its gate at Dallas-Forth Worth International.

As high winds persisted, reports surfaced of an overturned 18-wheeler truck and multiple car wrecks across Texas highways, local outlet WFAA reports.

In Magnolia County, a construction crew told local outlet KHOU one of their coworkers is trapped under the rubble of a home that collapsed during the storms. Two nearby homes are also in ruin. Magnolia Fire Chief Adam Vulgamott told KHOU officials are still actively searching as of 3 pm local time.

Texas is also hosting a primary run-off election on Tuesday. Voters will decide the final candidates for November’s ballot.

The power outages in the Dallas metro area prompted officials to extend polls by two hours in the state’s runoff elections after dozens of polling places lost power.

At least 76 polling places in four counties were without power due to the storms, The Texas Tribune reports.

“[The storm] kind of caught a lot of people on their way,” Nicholas Solorzano, communications manager at the Dallas County Elections Department, told the Tribune. “Unfortunately, many of our locations are still experiencing power outages like schools and libraries.”

The storm arrrived barely days after the area was walloped by a weather event known as a derecho — a widespread, long-lived windstorm that’s associated with a band of rapidly moving showers or thunderstorms.

“A lot of people are without power again. We just got through with derecho a couple week ago, which was extremely devastating and many are still trying to recover from,” Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo, the top elected official in the county home to Houston, said in a video posted on social media late Tuesday.

Over the weekend, multiple tornados were reported in the state with one plowing through Cooke County on Saturday night, approximately 50 miles north of Dallas. The dangerous storms left seven people dead ahead of Memorial Day.

Another 16 people died across the US from severe thunderstorms and tornadoes that pelted several states over the holiday weekend.

Those storms also disrupted Memorial Day travel, causing hundreds of canceled and delayed flights throughout the country. Heavy rain pelted much of Interstate 95 as well, the main north-south freeway that connects the East Coast.