GRANBURY, Texas - Officials in North Texas said Thursday that they were no longer searching for survivors after a mile-wide tornado touched down, killing at least six people and injuring dozens of others.
At least seven other people were listed as missing.
The National Weather Service said 16 confirmed tornadoes struck towns near Fort Worth beginning Wednesday evening.
Granbury, about 35 miles southwest of Fort Worth, was the hardest-hit area, accounting for the vast majority of the dead and injured, said Sheriff Roger Deeds of Hood County. Names of the victims have not yet been released, but the six confirmed dead were all adults, officials said.
Resident Elizabeth Tovar said fist-size hail heralded the tornado’s arrival and prompted her and her family to hide in their bathroom.
“We were all, like, hugging in the bathtub and that’s when it started happening. I heard glass shattering and I knew my house was going,” Tovar said, shaking her head. “We looked up and … the whole ceiling was gone.”
The weather service’s preliminary storm estimate was an EF4, based on the Fujita tornado damage scale. An EF5 is the most severe.
In Rancho Brazos, a subdivision a few miles southeast of Granbury, more than half the homes were flattened, had roofs torn off or walls knocked down, or were simply torn from foundations, officials said.
“Most all of that is heavily damaged to totally destroyed,” Deeds said Thursday at a news conference. “It’s definitely a nightmare.”
Steve Berry, a Hood County commissioner who worked as a firefighter for 23 years, said that during a tour of the neighborhood of modular, mobile and wood-frame homes, he had witnessed “total devastation.”
Many houses in the subdivision had been built in recent years by Habitat for Humanity. Berry said the houses had been tossed around so violently that they looked “like Tinkertoys.”
Ruby Derrick, a volunteer for Habitat for Humanity, said the organization has built nearly 70 homes in Hood County, with the majority of those in Rancho Brazos.
Authorities said about 110 homes were either destroyed or damaged in the subdivision; about 40 of the damaged homes were built by Habitat. They said other areas in the county had not yet been assessed.
The National Weather Service said the tornado in Granbury had wind speeds between 166 mph and 200 mph. Other tornadoes damaged nearby Cleburne and Millsap.
Utilities said about 20,000 homes and businesses in the region were without power early Thursday.
At sunrise Thursday, teams of fire crews aided by bulldozers and other heavy equipment began picking through rubble to determine if anyone was trapped, while electric crews worked to restore power.
A few hours later, Wayne McKethan, the city manager, said that all the survivors had been found with the aid of dogs.
“Search and rescue is over,” McKethan said. “We’re now in search and recovery” - that is, searching for the dead.
He pointed to a bare slab.
“There used to be a house there,” he said.
Access to the area was restricted Thursday because propane tanks had not been secured and wreckage had not been cleared. Among the damage, Berry said, was a water tower that “imploded.”
Bits of sheet metal hung from power lines and wrapped around trees, some of which had been stripped of leaves and branches so that they resembled toothpicks.
The first storms arrived in the area Wednesday about 6:30 p.m., with hard rain and a barrage of baseball-size hail, according to the National Weather Service. About an hour and a half later, at 8:10 p.m., the weather service issued a tornado warning and local officials began evacuating residents to shelters. People had about 20 minutes to make it to safety, officials said.
Berry said that he had believed that the severe weather had bypassed Granbury without causing significant damage when “the storm seemed to pass and back up on top of us.”
Deeds said 37 injured people were treated at hospitals.
On Thursday morning, Kyle McCombs, an emergency room physician at the Lake Granbury Medical Center, where he is also chief of staff, was sitting in his Chevrolet Suburban as he waited for a street to be reopened near the Rancho Brazos neighborhood. The police had blocked roads in the area because of downed power lines.
McCombs said he had worked overnight in the emergency room.
“It’s a real mess,” he said. “We saw the storm coming in and knew there was tornadic activity.”
At about 8 p.m., he said, administrators had sounded a “code black,” or severe weather alert, with instructions to move patients to interior hallways and away from windows.
Soon after, he said, ambulances started arriving with injured people.
“We had serious, major trauma, and a lot of it,” said McCombs, 47. “For a hospital of our size, we’ve never seen a mass trauma event like this.”
The emergency room typically sees as many as 65 people a day, he said, but Wednesday night, “we were more than half that all at once.”
McCombs said patients had arrived with a broad range of injuries, including severe lacerations and spinal and skull fractures.
He said many staff members had come in “off duty to assist. That’s what really saved us.”
He added, “We all just started divvying up patients.”
About a dozen people with more serious injuries were transferred to hospital trauma centers in Fort Worth, he said.
Another tornado cut a mile-wide path through Cleburne on Wednesday, storm spotters told the National Weather Service. The weather service said Wednesday that it was estimated as an EF3, which has winds between 136 mph and 165 mph.
Cleburne Mayor Scott Cain said Thursday morning that no one was killed or seriously hurt in the courthouse city of about 30,000 that’s about 25 miles southeast of Granbury. Nine people suffered minor injuries, and upward of 150 homes were damaged and another 50 were destroyed.
He described the storm as “bizarre” because severe winds kept shifting in different directions.
Another tornado hit the small town of Millsap, about 40 miles west of Fort Worth. Parker County Judge Mark Kelley said roof damage was reported to several houses and a barn was destroyed, but no injuries were reported.
Information for this article was contributed by John Schwartz of The New York Times and by Angela K. Brown, Jamie Stengle, Diana Heidgerd,Terry Wallace, John Mone and Mike Fuentes of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 05/17/2013