Severe weather rocked parts of Texas and Louisiana this week, leveling homes and claiming at least two lives, and photos posted to social media showed the severity of the destruction.
A tornado ripped through Caddo Parish in Louisiana on Tuesday, leading to the deaths of a 30-year-old woman and her 8-year-old son. Another two people were transported to a hospital while up to 30 houses in the Keithville community were struck by damage. Other homes were wholly destroyed.
Caddo Parish Sheriff Steve Prator told reporters that the body of the young boy was discovered more than a half-mile away from his residence in a wooded location. The body of the boy’s mother was found later under debris just a street over from her razed house. The two had been reported missing by the boy’s father.
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On Tuesday night, rescuers began to search after a tornado touched down in Farmerville, Louisiana, around 90 miles away from Keithville. Nearly two dozen people reportedly suffered injuries, some of which were critical. KNOE reporter Tyler Englander tweeted a video showing bulldozers sifting through the rubble of razed homes after the storm passed in Farmerville, revealing crushed appliances and kitchen sinks in the dust.
A tweet by storm chaser and photojournalist Brian Emfinger included an image revealing damage in yet another Louisiana community.
“Major destruction in the Four Forks Louisiana area,” Emfinger tweeted on Tuesday evening, along with a picture showing some of the destruction. In the photo, a motorcade of emergency vehicles travels down a road with their lights flashing, passing a row of leveled homes reduced to piles of debris.
This week’s storm system plunged the Great Plains into “blizzard-like conditions” and continued to menace parts of the South on Wednesday with severe weather, according to the Associated Press. Oklahoma has also witnessed tornado damage.
North Texas saw some five confirmed tornadoes on Tuesday, but Fort Worth’s National Weather Service reported that the real number may have been as high as 12.
On Tuesday, Twitter user @KyleQWilliamson shared a video that appeared to show a tornado near Highway 114 in Grapevine, a city near Dallas. Images posted to Twitter by photojournalist Michael Beard also depicted severe damage to vehicles and a home in Decatur, Texas.
One of Beard’s aerial shots shows the roof ripped clean off a home. Other photos show a crushed truck pierced with debris and a semi overturned on the side of a highway.
Another video taken in North Texas seemed to show a tornado ripping through a residential street. One social media user tweeted a clip of the storm on Tuesday afternoon.
“Dude. This was pretty crazy,” user @doncap24 wrote. “My little Texas Tornado.”
Newsweek previously reported that Texas could next experience a colder-than-normal Christmas thanks to an incoming Arctic blast. It could potentially put a strain on the state’s power grid, which experienced widespread failure in February 2021 following severe winter storms.
