Texas storms: Power cuts expected for days

Local officials have warned that it could take time for power to be restored.

“This unfortunately will be a multi-day power outage situation,” Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins said on Tuesday.

About 500,000 customers in Texas alone are without electricity, according to monitoring site Poweroutage.us – following an earlier peak of more than a million.

The death of a 16-year-old was announced late on Tuesday by the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office, after a house under construction collapsed during a storm.

Most workers on site were able to safely flee when they noticed the structure begin to shift – apart from the teenager.

Texas earlier suffered a devastating weekend of storms that killed several people in the state, injured more than 100, and damaged or destroyed many homes.

There were other storm-related deaths in Arkansas, Oklahoma, Alabama and Kentucky. In the latter state, the story has emerged of a man whose family home was flattened by tornadoes for the second time in three years.

“This time, everything that we have is gone,” Devin Johnson told ABC News.

The unrelenting harsh weather for parts of the US comes as forecasters warn of a possibly “extraordinary” 2024 Atlantic hurricane season, beginning next month.

Record-high sea surface temperatures are partly to blame, as is a likely shift in regional weather patterns.

While there is no evidence climate change is producing more hurricanes, it is making the most powerful ones more likely, and bringing heavier rainfall.