Texas Storm Tragedy: Teen Dies Amidst Baseball-Sized Hail and Power Outages

Severe storms swept through Texas, resulting in one fatality and widespread damage. The storms, which hit the Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan areas with hurricane-force winds and baseball-sized hail, left over 400,000 customers without power, a significant decrease from the more than one million affected just a day earlier. Travel disruptions were also significant, with over 850 flight cancellations and delays at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport.
A tragic casualty of the storm was a 16-year-old construction worker in Magnolia County, who died after being trapped under rubble when the home he was working on collapsed due to the storm’s intensity. The National Weather Service reported that the storms lasted into early Wednesday morning, with wind gusts reaching up to 95 miles per hour. Power outages could take days to repair, especially in hard-hit areas like Dallas County.
The storms also impacted Texas’s primary runoff election, causing power outages at dozens of polling places and leading to extended voting hours. The weather event has been part of a series of severe weather incidents affecting Texas, including multiple tornadoes over the weekend that claimed seven lives ahead of Memorial Day. Nationwide, severe thunderstorms and tornadoes over the holiday weekend resulted in an additional 16 deaths and disrupted Memorial Day travel.