A severe storm and tornado ripped through a city west of the Dallas-Fort Worth area on Tuesday night, leaving a trail of shredded buildings. The storm was the latest stretch of severe weather that has walloped parts of the central United States for nearly a week.
Two people in the city, Mineral Wells, Texas, were reported hospitalized with non-life-threatening injuries, and other residents were displaced from their homes, as officials assessed the damage on Wednesday morning. Ryan Dunn, the Mineral Wells police chief, said at a news conference Wednesday that the National Weather Service had confirmed that a tornado had hit the town.
The news conference took place against a backdrop of destruction with roofs sheared off buildings and other structures reduced to what looked like piles of oversized matchsticks. Most of the damage occurred to commercial and industrial buildings, Mr. Dunn said. Residential buildings were largely spared.
The commercial and industrial buildings were mostly empty when the tornado hit late in the afternoon.
“When you can see the destruction here, you can tell it’s amazing” that there were no serious injuries, said Regan Johnson, the mayor of Mineral Wells. She added that a tornado had hit the area about a decade ago, but “I’m not sure we have anything in the records like this.”
Tuesday’s storms were part of a broader stretch of dangerous weather that has unfolded since last week, damaging homes and cars, flooding neighborhoods and knocking out power for thousands from Texas to Michigan to Kentucky. Over the weekend, a thunderstorm that produced a tornado swept through towns an hour north of Mineral Wells, leaving two dead, according to officials in Wise and Parker Counties.
Thunderstorms that unleash a destructive combination of hail, tornadoes, heavy rain or strong winds can occur nationwide any time. But this is the time of year when they are most common, as a sometimes daily parade of storm systems moves across the central part of the country. Predicting when, exactly, a typical springtime storm will turn into something more dangerous can be difficult.
Since Thursday, parts of the Plains and the South have recorded more than 50 reports of tornadoes, including one that destroyed homes and damaged an Air Force base in Enid, Okla.
On Tuesday, baseball-size hail was reported in North Texas and parts of Missouri, where the state highway patrol posted photos of several squad cars with shattered windshields.
Severe winds also whipped through the Ozarks on Tuesday, killing a 21-year-old emu at the Dickerson Park Zoo in Springfield, Mo. Another member of the zoo’s avian family, a male rhea, a large flightless bird, was being tended to for injuries, the zoo said.
The harsh weather threat was expected to lessen on Wednesday but still posed potential hazards, especially for parts of the South. Forecasters at the Storm Prediction Center said the most severe storms were expected over parts of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. The primary threats include damaging winds and large hail, with the potential for isolated large hail, exceeding two inches in diameter, in areas of Texas.
Jesus Jiménez, Nazaneen Ghaffar and Erin McCann contributed reporting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/29/us/texas-missouri-tornado-storm-damage.html
