Published: June 11, 2009 08:32 pm      

Storms bring needed rain

Damaging winds, hail pound North, East Texas

DALLAS (AP) — A series of powerful storms packing heavy rains and frequent lightning strikes grounded dozens of flights, left about 245,000 North Texans without power and made for a chaotic Thursday morning rush-hour commute through flooded streets without working traffic lights.

No deaths or injuries were reported from the storms, which began whipping the Dallas-Fort Worth area with winds up to 70 mph Wednesday night. Thunderstorms continued moving through the region Thursday and started to clear by mid-afternoon after dumping more than 8 inches of rain on portions of Dallas.

Limbs ripped from trees caused many of the power outages to more than 260,000 homes and businesses overnight. Power had been restored to all but 145,000 Dallas-Fort Worth-area customers by daybreak Thursday. However, new storms later blacked out 100,000 more, Dallas-based Oncor Electric Delivery spokeswoman Jeamy Molina.

Crews planned to work throughout Thursday night to get power restored. About 2,600 repair crew members from Oncor, contractors and neighboring electric utilities were working to restore service when safe, but lightning and heavy rain were interrupting those efforts earlier on Thursday, Molina said.

Some 22,000 AEP/SWEPCO customers in East Texas lost power at the utility’s outage peak. AEP/SWEPCO spokesman Scott McCloud says the utility expects to have 95 percent of those remaining customers restored by midnight.

Trees were down and some roofs have blown off of structures in Goldthwaite from a severe thunderstorm late Thursday afternoon, according to a dispatcher at the Mills County Sheriff’s Office.

A dispatcher for the Comanche County Central Dispatch said power had been knocked out to the entire city of Comanche earlier Thursday but most of the electricity was restored Thursday evening. She said tree limbs were down.

More than 400 flights were canceled Thursday at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport before they resumed operating later in the day. Ground workers were brought in from outside part of the day because of lightning in the area, said airport spokesman David Magana.

Vivid lightning was suspected in at least one fire that destroyed a large, two-story house in the town of Heath on Lake Ray Hubbard near Dallas.

Southwest Airlines, which flies out of Dallas Love Field, canceled 21 flights Thursday because of the weather — 15 of those were in Dallas. Another 13 planes were diverted in the height of the morning’s storms and dozens of flights were delayed across the country, said Brad Hawkins, a Southwest spokesman.

“They expected the storms to develop and move through, then they just parked,” he said. “That’s what threw everything for a loop.”

The marina at Eagle Mountain Lake in Fort Worth sustained millions of dollars worth of damage and was closed. The storms damaged the marina’s roof, smashed docks and turned boats upside down, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported.

The heaviest rainfall was in downtown Dallas, where 8.23 inches of rain fell at Fair Park in a 24-hour period and 7 to 8 inches accumulated during the day in other parts of the city, said National Weather Service meteorologist Daniel Huckaby.

Forecasters recorded 2.70 inches of rainfall at DFW Airport on Thursday. That broke the 1945 record of 1.19 inches, Huckaby said.

Dime-sized hail fell over Fort Worth and DFW Airport recorded wind gusts of 53 mph, Huckaby said.

Winds swept the area overnight, causing widespread damage. The worst appeared to be in the northern suburbs of Dallas and Fort Worth, where trees, fences and chimneys toppled.

Michelle Levitsky, of Frisco, just north of Dallas, says the winds bewildered her farm animals.

“When the storm hit, they started running around, running into each other. The goats were being knocked over and tumbling. The chickens — we had their wings clipped — they were in the air, just being picked up by the wind,” she told KDFW-TV of Dallas and Fort Worth. She said all survived.