Tornado slams Dallas; 4 killed in Ark., Okla.
DALLAS —A tornado tossed trees into homes, tore off storefronts and downed power lines but killed no one in a densely populated area of Dallas, leaving Mayor Eric Johnson to declare the city “very fortunate” to be assessing only property damage.
A meteorologist said people took shelter thanks to early alerts, and that it was fortunate the tornado struck Sunday evening, when many people were home.
“Anytime you have a tornado in a major metropolitan area, the potential for large loss of life is always there,” said Patrick Marsh, the warning coordination meteorol- ogist at NOAA’s Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma. “We were very fortunate that the tornado did not hit the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium or the State Fair, where you would have had a lot of people that were exposed.”
The tornado crossed over two major interstates. “If that happened at rush hour, I think we’d be talking about a different story,” he said. The National Weather Ser
vice said the tornado that ripped through North Dallas was an EF-3, which has a max- imum wind speed of 140 mph. The agency said another tornado in the suburb of Rowlett was EF-1, with maximum wind speeds of 100 mph.
The late-night storms caused chaos in several states and killed at least four people in Arkansas and Okla- homa. The Storm Predic- tion Center said severe thun- derstorms could continue through Monday night along the Gulf Coast from southeast Louisiana to the Florida Panhandle, with damaging winds and a couple of tornadoes possible.
In one Dallas neighbor- hood, Dustin and Lauren Collins said they felt lucky as they cleared debris from the yard of their largely intact home.
“When other people’s homes are in your front yard, you just realize — just the magnitude of the storm,” said Lauren Collins, 36.
Dustin Collins, 37, said he gathered his family together after receiving the tornado alert. They climbed into the bathtub and pulled a mattress over top, huddling there with their 8-month-old son. “We just sat in the bathtub and sang songs, trying to keep everyone calm,” Lauren Collins said.
Several stores were destroyed at a nearby shop- ping center, with large parts of the roof gone and only a mess of debris left inside.
Nearby, Georges Bena- mou said he was in his bed- room when a tree branch fell through the flat roof of his single-story home and into the living room.
“I heard some crack, crack, crack, and then I heard some trees falling on top of the roof,” he said.
Brent Huddleston, 43, said he sheltered with his 9- and 11-year-old children in a closet as the house shook around them. They later found parts of street and shopping center signs that had been blown into their yard.
“It hit really fast,” he said.
Dallas Fire-Rescue spokes- man Jason Evans said no firefighters were hurt when the storm made the roof of Station 41 collapse.
Tornadoes are not common in October, and cities are rarely hit because they don’t have a big footprint in the tornado belt, according to tornado scientist Harold Brooks of the National Severe Storms Laboratory.
It’s like “randomly throw- ing darts,” Brooks said.
A study by Brooks last year found that only one-third of the most violent tornadoes hit communities of more than 5,000 people.
The storm system disrupted flights in the Dallas area, northwest Arkansas and at Memphis Interna- tional Airport in Tennessee, where windows were broken.