A large tornado tore through the town of Matador, Tex., leaving four people dead and 10 injured, emergency services said early Thursday. The destructive tornado hit amid a siege of violent storms stretching from around Houston to Denver on Wednesday afternoon and night.
Matador “experienced an unprecedented tornado bringing damaging winds to the town,” Lubbock Fire Rescue said in a statement confirming the casualty toll. A team from Lubbock’s fire department was helping with search and rescue operations in Matador, it said earlier.
The tornado flattened the town’s general store, crumpled RVs and tractor-trailers, threw cars across the highway and sheared the tops off trees along the roads.
“The western part of town has been pretty much wiped out,” said Brandon Moore, a city official in Matador. “It’s really a mess.”
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Derek Delgado, the public information officer for Lubbock Fire Rescue, arrived in Matador before midnight. Trees and debris had snapped power lines and damaged a substation to create a complete blackout as responding agencies poured into town, leaving him and others to navigate by the lights of emergency vehicles.
“When we got here, it was dark, but we had a good idea of what the aftermath of the tornado had done to the town,” Delgado said. “But once the sun started rising and we got a full glimpse, a wide-angle picture …. I was driving around with a pretty senior firefighter from the area and he was truly shocked because he’s never seen anything like this.”
With no power and temperatures forecast to hit triple digits, response teams opened cooling shelters where residents can get water — and respite — before heading back outside to sift through the damage, said Sgt. Johnny Bures of the Texas Department of Public Safety.
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The U.S. highway that runs through town will remain closed to nonresidents as emergency crews continue cleanup and work to restore power as early as Friday night, he said.
End of carouselDelgado called the damage “devastating” to the town of nearly 600, but Phillip Hamilton, 62, said Matador faced a similar challenge before — nearly 40 years ago — and rebounded.
In 1984, Hamilton was a young reporter working for the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal when a tornado barreled through Matador on May 1 and struck Motley High School as students and faculty were gathered inside for commencement exercises.
“In the days after, I was going back and talking to residents and all of them [were] taking about rebuilding,” Hamilton said. “For a small, tiny town, they survived and they put things back together.”
No one was severely injured in the 1984 tornado, though more than two dozen homes were destroyed.
“I would just say to the folks there, knowing this is West Texas, people come together,” Hamilton said. “Everyone will come around these 600 people and the Lord will bring them the people who need to be there.”
Matador is the latest community to be pummeled by dangerous storms and tornadoes in a year in which 69 people in the United States have already died in tornadoes. That number is three times as high as the toll in all of 2022.
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William Iwasko, a forecaster with the National Weather Service office in Lubbock, told the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal that there had been three confirmed tornadoes in the line of storms.
Tornadoes were also reported in nearby Afton, the agency reported.
The Lubbock office tweeted that it had sent out a survey team to Matador on Thursday to determine the tornado’s rating.
Storm outbreak spanned from Texas to Wyoming
The Matador tornado occurred amid an outbreak of severe thunderstorms that also affected swaths of both eastern and western Texas, the panhandle of Oklahoma, Colorado and southeast Wyoming. The Weather Service received more than 200 reports of severe weather, including 14 tornadoes and more than 100 reports of large hail, some as large as softballs.
In Texas, excessively high temperatures helped fuel the storms, which towered as high as 65,000 to 70,000 feet into the atmosphere.
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In Houston, which soared to 100 degrees Wednesday afternoon, violent storms unleashed a gust to 97 mph. The wind speeds surpassed the previous record set during Hurricane Ike in 2008, the Houston weather office tweeted. In West Texas, a 95 mph gust was clocked near Rotan, about 80 miles south of Matador.
Before the storms erupted, the debilitating heat wave in Texas sent temperatures soaring past 110 in some places. Del Rio hit an all-time high of 115 degrees and San Angelo registered 114 degrees, matching its all-time high set the previous day. The record-breaking heat wave is likely to persist across large portions of Texas, the forecast said, into early next week.
More than 400,000 customers in Texas were without power late Wednesday because of the storms, according to Poweroutage.us. That number had dipped to around 170,000 Thursday afternoon. On Tuesday, the state’s power grid operator had asked locals to voluntarily reduce electricity use for four hours, given the extreme heat and expectations of record demand.
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Last week, a tornado ripped through Perryton in the northeast panhandle of Texas, killing three people and injuring as many as 100.
The Matador storm produced the fourth deadly tornado nationwide this month, the most since June 2010. Twenty-three deadly tornadoes have occurred so far this year in the Lower 48, the most since 2011.
The Weather Service also issued tornado warnings for multiple counties in eastern Colorado. A dangerous hailstorm in Red Rocks in the Denver metropolitan area injured nearly 100 concertgoers. Seven people were taken to hospitals for treatment, the West Metro fire department said, adding that the injuries included cuts and broken bones.
Storm chasers captured footage of two tornadoes on the ground simultaneously between Akron and Anton in northeast Colorado, about 100 miles east of Denver.
Denver received 1.85 inches of rain from the storm, its wettest June day since 1970.
Ian Livingston contributed to this report.
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