Texas is still facing harsh weather after at least 25 people were killed in severe weather over the Memorial Day weekend. Damaging wind and hail ravaged the area with widespread power outages in Dallas and Fort Worth.
The storms also caused deaths in Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina and Virginia.
In Cooke County, Texas, seven people were killed by a tornado that razed a mobile home park on Saturday, according to local officials. Five people died in Kentucky, Governor Andy Beshear said Monday. Two died in Oklahoma in Mayes County, and one man in Missouri died while camping on Sunday when a tree limb fell onto his tent.
This tornado season could suggest some changes from the norm, particularly where tornadoes are touching ground.
“We’re talking maybe changes of up to 10% in places where tornadoes were already relatively frequent, and we don’t actually have good explanations for necessarily why those changes have happened,” Harold Brooks, a senior scientist at the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma, told VOA.
However, the evidence isn’t necessarily conclusive.
“Even where tornadoes are frequent, they’re still relatively rare. When events are rare, you need a really long record to actually be able to tell if there have been changes or not,” Brooks said.
It is certain that tornado activity has been unusually prominent this season. April brought the second-largest recorded number of tornadoes in the country’s history. Climate change has contributed to the increased severity of storms globally. Brooks cites a pattern of warm, moist air over the past two months as the cause of the series of tornadoes.
In the wake of the Memorial Day storms, baseball-sized hail and fierce winds continued to target north Texas on Tuesday morning. In an ongoing heat wave reaching triple-digit temperatures, almost 800,000 people were without electricity on Tuesday, as reported by PowerOutage.us.
The power outages disrupted the runoff elections when around 100 voting sites in Dallas County were without power.
“This ultimately will be a multiday power outage situation,” said Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins.
Heavy rain is predicted Tuesday night for Dallas.
VOA’s Kim Lewis contributed to this report. Some information for this report came from The Associated Press.
