HOUSTON (AP) – Power outages remained widespread yesterday in storm-weary Texas, United States (US) a day after another burst of severe weather flooded streets, uprooted trees and ripped off roofs.
Authorities said a teenager was killed at a construction site while working on a home that collapsed.
The severe weather on Tuesday, which at one point left more than one million customers without electricity, was a continuation of deadly storms, some spawning tornadoes, across the US over the long Memorial Day weekend that killed 24 people in seven states.
The flooding and damage in Houston came just weeks 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. That storm left eight people dead and knocked out power to hundreds of thousands of customers.
“A lot of people are without power again. We just got through with the derecho a couple of weeks 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 on Tuesday.
Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator Deanne Criswell was scheduled to travel to Arkansas, where seven people died in the weekend storms, as the Biden administration continues assessing tornado damage.
The potential for heavy rains, localised flash flooding and severe weather will continue Wednesday through Oklahoma and Texas.
Thunderstorms are predicted today across eastern Montana and Wyoming and northeast Colorado before pushing into Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and northern Texas.
Tuesday’s power outages in the Dallas area prompted officials to extend polls by two hours in the state’s runoff elections after dozens of polling places lost power.
The city opened respite centers, where residents could seek shelter and air conditioning after winds gusting to 129 kilometres per hour caused extensive damage to homes.
