Tornado Alley used to be a little more to the northwest, but recently Dallas has seen more tornado activity. I’ve texted my good friend who lives in Irving but haven’t heart back yet. Looks like it started just north of Irving and moved eastward. One story said the wind got up to 111 mph.
Any Dopers affected?
North Fort Worth here, and that storm rolled through like a freight train, about midnight here. We’d had an earlier line of storms around 7:30, and I believe that storm was the one that went on to produce the tornado that hit Love Field.
But for me, the midnight storm was way louder and scarier. The radar showed a level 2 rotation headed right for my area at one point, though it dissipated. I don’t think windspeed was anywhere near 100 here, but judging by the noise and damages, I’d guess 60s. It was LOUD. We had small hail off and on for an hour, but nothing like the egg-sized hail I’ve been seeing on Facebook today.
There are a lot of fences down this morning, and a few trees, but we have power at least, and there doesn’t seem to have been any bad flooding. I’ve heard that 200,000 are without power this morning in Dallas County, and a number of schools are cancelled.
We had to take cover, but the only damage was a few very small branches falling. I heard there was a lot more damage just south of us, so I walked down there this morning. About a quarter of a mile south of my house, I started seeing much bigger branches down and some light debris. About half a mile south of my house, I saw fences blown over, trees down and at one intersection the traffic lights were blown over. I just saw some footage from a news helicopter of the neighborhood just south of that intersection and there were several houses with roofs partially missing and trees down. One of the houses is where a friend of my son lives.
In the neighborhood just north of that intersection I stopped and talked to a friend. They had a large tree in their front yard blow over and land on two cars in the street. You might well think, “At least it didn’t land on their house” and that is certainly true, but the large tree in their backyard did land on their house. My friend was in pretty good spirits, all things considered. I’m not sure if it was because of her naturally perky disposition or because she had spiked her coffee with something, but either way I’m not going to judge.
I’m in my mid-50s and I’ve never seen a familiar neighborhood on the news like that before. I hope it’s another 50 years before it happens again.
Preliminary path of tornado in N. Dallas. It appears to my untrained eye from photos of the area, that the damage was mostly F-1, to F-2.
(Roofs damaged/got holes in it, F-1; to Roofs gone, F-2. When walls start departing, it’s an F-3. When all of the walls are smashed, but everything is still in a pile on the slab, F-4. When the slab’s scraped clean, F-5.)
Big, wide destructive path. Very pleasantly surprised there have been no fatalities mentioned so far.
I’ve seen pictures of at least one brick building with the walls down. I would guess it got to an F-3 for at least a little while.
I’ve looked at some of the videos. There’s one that shows the tornado close to its start, and it’s fairly thin and wispy. Later videos show a much bigger pipe. The videos are all shot at night, so you have to watch for the lightning strikes. It’s like Nature’s own little horror movie: is there anything out there? Darkness. BAM! Tornado at one o’clock.
I live just a bit south of where the yellow area on Gray Ghost’s link crosses 635 (i.e. just outside of the path- Abrams @ Forest), and at about 9:17, it got really windy at the house, but the power didn’t go out or anything, and we didn’t have any damage.
This morning, I drove eastward on Forest to 75 on my way to work, and the real damage started on the east side of Greenville Ave- pretty much from about Shepherd Rd. to 75 was varying levels of blown down trees, messed up commercial signs and other damage- hard to tell completely because it was dark, but one guy’s cinder block back fence-wall was completely wrecked, and it seemed like the most damaged area was from about Stults Rd/TI Blvd to US 75 on Forest (that Home Depot in the news is right south of there).
This cinderblock wall was pretty much wrecked.
I live about 3 miles from the path close to where it first touched down. Strangely not much wind but lost power for a day. A bit before midnight Monday I wake up to the sound of chainsaws nearby and have power back shortly afterwards. Considering the devastation nearby, I’m surprised (and thankful) that they responded so quickly, was expecting multiple days of outages.
Here are some pics from the air. Owner says they’re copyrighted, but OK to share on social media. It’s a mess for sure.
I live on the far western edge of DFW, and our neighborhood had limbs and fences down, and one brick wall blown over. Before the storm, I had pinned and locked all my fence and driveway gates, and also winched my large and most vulnerable fence gate up against a board wedged into the ground (hard to describe rube Goldberg thing, but makes a very strong triangle). No wind damage to my house or fence at all, even though neighbors not so lucky. My boat is out of the water and on a maintenance cradle this week, so the only problem was the cover partially removed by wind. One dock was torn loose and traveled down the lake a ways.
Re: that first picture. “The bodies of the buses go round and round. Round and round.”