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Homes destroyed, thousands without power after tornado rips through Dallas – Metro US

Homes destroyed, thousands without power after tornado rips through Dallas

(Reuters) – Dallas authorities were assessing how badly a tornado that plowed through the northern part of the city late on Sunday damaged buildings, as it also flipped cars and knocked out power to more than 175,000 homes and businesses.

Three people have been hospitalized with non-life threatening injuries attributed to the storm, the city of Dallas said in a statement.

“There are still residents impacted by downed trees, power outages, and storm-related damages,” the city said, adding that multiple traffic signals were also knocked out by the storm.

Some 55,000 homes and businesses in Dallas County were still without power on Monday morning, emergency management officials said.

The storm left a miles-long swath of destruction through Dallas, hitting near the Love Field airport in the city’s north, the National Weather Service’s Weather Prediction Center in College Park, Maryland, said on Monday.

Video footage on Twitter showed collapsed roofs, overturned cars and homes reduced to piles of debris in the wake of the twister in Richardson, Texas, a suburb northeast of Dallas.

Around 20 people impacted by the tornado spent the night at a leisure complex near the airport that was turned into a shelter, said Maya Johnson, an assistant at the Bachman Recreation Center.

Images showed the roof and walls of a Home Depot store had caved in, exposing a mangled web of ceiling beams.

“It was exactly one tornado that hit at 9:02 p.m.,” said National Weather Service meteorologist David Roth.

“We also saw golf ball- and baseball-sized hail in some areas and a narrow swath of north Dallas that got between one to three inches of rain,” Roth said, or the equivalent of 2.5 cm to 7.6 cm.

(Reporting by Subrat Patnaik in Bengaluru, Rich McKay in Atlanta and Gabriella Borter in New York; Editing by Steve Orlofsky, Matthew Lewis and Andrea Ricci)