Residents across parts of Tarrant County are cleaning up after a sudden burst of severe weather brought strong winds, hail and heavy rain to North Texas on Wednesday night.<\/p>\n
The storms damaged buildings, knocked down power lines and left thousands without electricity. A ground stop was also issued at DFW Airport.<\/p>\n
NBC 5 Meteorologist Grant Johnston said the storm produced a downburst with 70 mph winds.<\/p>\n
The storms moved through Wednesday evening after weeks of hot, dry conditions, catching many residents off guard. Viewer videos and photos shared with NBC 5 showed hail falling in North Richland Hills and Fort Worth, while powerful winds caused damage in Watauga.<\/p>\n
In Watauga, downed power lines, broken windows, and debris littered parts of the city. At least one business is heavily damaged on Rufe Snow Drive.<\/p>\n
Monty Osmen said he was closing up his business when the storm rolled through.<\/p>\n
“A big gust of wind came. I don’t know if it was a tornado or what exactly,” Osmen said. “Just heard a loud noise and I see all the electrical wires and everything sparking and stuff like that.”<\/p>\n
The storm damaged at least one commercial building and scattered metal debris throughout the area. First responders spent part of the evening surveying damage and checking on affected areas.<\/p>\n
“I’m baffled, honestly; I’ve never witnessed something like this,” Osmen said.<\/p>\n
The storms also caused power outages across portions of Tarrant and Dallas counties. According to Oncor, crews worked through the night to assess damage and restore service.<\/p>\n
By Thursday morning, outage numbers had dropped significantly, with only a few hundred customers still without power as restoration efforts continued.<\/p>\n
The National Weather Service has not yet released a final assessment on what specific wind speeds may have caused the damage in Watauga.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Residents across parts of Tarrant County are cleaning up after a sudden burst of severe weather brought strong…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":418214,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[150,152,151,122],"class_list":["post-418213","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arlington","tag-arlington","tag-arlington-headlines","tag-arlington-news","tag-tarrant-county"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/418213","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=418213"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/418213\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/418214"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=418213"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=418213"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=418213"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}