DALLAS — Multiple tornadoes tore through north Texas on Saturday, leaving one person dead and others unaccounted for in a sparsely populated farming and ranching area as the system slowly weakened while advancing toward Fort Worth.
Walter Fairbanks, fire chief in Cisco, confirmed there was one fatality when the tornado hit near the town in the afternoon.
Authorities were going house to house to assess the damage, but that proved difficult amid the heavy rainfall, Eastland County Judge Rex Fields said.
“There is a considerable amount of damage,” said Fields, who also serves as the county’s emergency services coordinator. “Homes have been lost.”
Fields said the tornado has taken the homes “into pieces and blown them out into pastures.”
The extent of injuries or fatalities wasn’t immediately clear there or in Burkburnett, where a second tornado touched down. A police dispatcher said tornado sirens could be heard in Burkburnett just before 6 p.m.
The storm was about 30 miles outside of Fort Worth around 8:30 p.m., but the National Weather Service had canceled tornado warnings in the counties still in its path.
The Weather Service on Saturday afternoon elevated to “moderate” the risk of tornadoes in the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area and elsewhere across north Texas. Eastland County, which was part of the enhanced zone, was pelted with 3-inch hail as the storm rumbled through.
“As expected, the environment in north Texas is particularly favorable (for tornadoes),” said Bill Bunting, chief of operations at the Norman, Okla.-based Storm Prediction Center.
Storms also brought heavy rain and quarter-sized hail to parts of southwest Oklahoma on Saturday afternoon. Meteorologists said there was so much rain — and so little sun — that the tornado threat there lessened throughout the day.
But the threatening skies stretched beyond the Plains states, as twin weather systems stretching from the Carolinas to California produced an unseasonably early tropical storm in the Atlantic and a late-season snowstorm in the Rocky Mountains.
Hot spots
Texas: An official in north Texas said homes were destroyed and one person was killed after a tornado struck a rural farming and ranching area. A second tornado touched down north of Wichita Falls. It was too early to determine the extent of damage or whether there were injuries.
Oklahoma: National Weather Service forecaster Daryl Williams says nickel- to quarter-sized hail was reported Saturday near Lawton and Anadarko in southwestern Oklahoma. One to 2 inches of rain had fallen across southeastern Oklahoma since midnight, while rainfall totals were up to an inch in northwestern Oklahoma. Tornado watches were issued for much of Oklahoma and western Kansas. The Associated Press
