Victim identified as probe begins into crane failure
DALLAS — Authorities identified 29-year-old Kiersten Symone Smith as the woman who was killed when a crane fell on a Dallas apartment building Sunday amid severe thunderstorms that also uprooted trees and left thousands without power across the city.
Smith was pronounced dead at a hospital, according to the Dallas County Medical Examiners’ office, after the construction crane smashed into a five-story building near downtown, destroying peoples’ apartments and reducing parts of an adjacent parking garage to a pile of concrete and mangled cars.
The crane fell around 2 p.m. as storms ripped across parts of Oklahoma and Texas, bringing high winds, heavy rain and hail that flooded streets and caused power outages. Wind gusts up to 71 mph were measured at Dallas Love Field airport, said National Weather Service meteorologist Patricia Sanchez.
At the Elan City Lights building damaged by the crane, fire crews were escorting evacuated residents back inside to retrieve their possessions, as city workers and Occupational Safety and Health Administration officials decide how to remove the crane embedded in the structure’s east side.
A spokesman for the federal agency confirmed it’s investigating the crane’s collapse but declined to provide further comment.
Oncor, the utility serving the region, said Monday that its crews were working around-the-clock to restore electricity in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. The electric company said that at the peak more than 350,000 of their customers were without power.
Almost 500 traffic signals were still inoperable Monday across Dallas, and about 170 were flashing red lights.
Sanchez said a Weather Service crew was going out Monday to determine the intensity of a reported tornado that damaged houses in Copperas Cove, located about 75 miles north of Austin. About 200 homes were damaged.