Posted on 05/16/2024 9:27:06 PM PDT by texas booster
There's damage all over the Greater Houston area after a thunderstorm brought powerful wind and heavy rain. At least four people were killed, Mayor John Whitmire said, and he urged everyone to stay off the roads and stay safe.
In scenes reminiscent of Hurricane Alicia back in 1983, the storm blew out hundreds of windows of downtown skyscrapers leaving workers scrambling for cover and glass all over the streets and sidewalks. The damaged buildings include the Wells Fargo Plaza, Total Energies, Enterprise Plaza, Kinder Morgan and Chevron.
Workers on higher floors say they felt the towers sway amid the whipping wind.
“I could feel the floor moving," Ann Tran told us. "I was sitting in an office and a door was just sliding in and out by itself."
Another downtown worker shared video with KHOU 11 News reporter Jason Miles that showed a window blowing out in a tunnel level restaurant of the Wells Fargo Plaza where people huddled during the storm.
(Excerpt) Read more at khou.com ...
Winds were clocked at 80 to 100 mph, according to Whitmire.
"It looks like a tornado to me," Lewis told us.
“It sounded like a train horn – like 10 train horns – like everything we heard from people who lived through tornadoes," Wes Waitkus said.
There were tornado warnings for Harris County but no confirmed tornados.
A wall collapsed on one side of the Conejo Malo bar on Travis Street near Buffalo Bayou. We're told it wasn't open when it happened.
“I never thought I’d see something like this in downtown Houston – it’s spectacular, it really is," Kyle Flick said.
A ping out to the Texas Ping list, founded by Windflier.
Please stay careful down in Houston. Lots of rain in DFW but not those crazy winds!
Another special Texas summer edition for your perusal.
As always, please FReepmail me if you want on or off the Texas Ping list.
Blessings, and stay cool!
Possible tornado
Tornado at the Wells Fargo Plaza in downtown Houston 5-16-2014
https://rumble.com/v4vole2-tornado-at-the-wells-fargo-plaza-in-downtown-houston.html
Sorry to hear they are having trouble down there.
Derecho?
Getting hit with strong winds from the backside of a thunderstorm will get your attention!
Pet peeve rant
It’s not “people” without power it’s Customers
When they say on the news 40,000 people without power it’s the number of outrages not “people”
One house outage (one customer) could mean 5 people
That is all
Agreed.
Losing those high tension power lines is a hard thing to replace quickly.
At Centerpoint can do it (mostly) pretty quickly.
Derechos are more or less straight line winds that cover many miles and last hours. Tornados can hit and miss quickly.
It took some serious localized negative pressure to suck that facade right off the building. You’re probably right that it took a tornado to do that.
It looks like an earthquake hit.
Agree in principle, however….
Up here we have a cooperative, so it is members, not customers. Also, there is zero way to count members, but there is an easy way to count meters.
Yep…it was stormy and wild for hours here - got real dark a couple of times, hailed for a few minutes, but this system must have picked up some punch as it made its way to Houston. I’ve checked with all of my friends there -still waiting to hear from a few. One told me that about 50% of the area is without power. Crazy!
What did Texas do to piss off God? My state should be in shambles.
One of my local radar sources allows me to go back several hours and to pan anywhere there is NWS radar — in this case to just as the storm whacked Houston. It really looks like “merely” a strong line of storms that weakens after hitting Houston, but, I don’t see earlier than that for several hours, so, hard to say.
The part of the line that was NE of Houston, though, in the Beaumont, TX, and Lake St. Charles, LA, area, is another matter. That has held together all the way to New Orleans, and at points has had that bow echo characteristic. I don’t know how much damage it’s done, but that puppy certainly appears to be potent.
Definitely. Took out the windows and pressurized the building.
I saw pictures of high-tension lines with the towers knocked over, like Godzilla had just walked through them.
We had one of those come thru Atlanta in 2014 IIRC. It was no fun. Took out power, dropped big trees on the three main roads in / out of my neighborhood. Only way out was a really circuitous route involving about 8 roads to get to a suburban arterial.
“Mother Nature’s In Charge; We’re Just Along For The Ride.” — Me, 1996
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