Fort Worth surveys tornado damage, counts the cost

Workers pile up debris in a neighborhood on the west side of Fort Worth

Only cleanup crews allowed downtown

March 30, 2000
Web posted at: 1:59 p.m. EST (1859 GMT)

In this story: Softball-size hailstone kills man Twister possibly packed winds of 206 mph 'It looks like a battlefield' Fire crews search skyscrapers floor by floor RELATED STORIES, SITES

From staff and wire reports

FORT WORTH, Texas -- A massive cleanup operation was still under way in Fort Worth on Thursday after back-to-back tornadoes smashed through the downtown area and the city's suburbs, killing four people and causing an estimated $300 million in damage.

The death toll from the twisters stood at four, with one person missing and presumed dead.

MESSAGE BOARD Nature's wrath     RESOURCES The Red Cross is taking donations to help tornado victims @ (800) 435-7669 (HELPNOW)     ALSO Tornadoes don't discriminate between trailer parks or skyscrapers

The downtown core of Fort Worth, a 12-square-block area, remained closed to all but those involved in the cleanup effort.

Fort Worth Mayor Kenneth Barr said the city center would probably be closed for several more days as the cleanup efforts continue. Downtown has been sealed off because of the danger of falling glass from skyscrapers damaged by Tuesday evening's twisters.

Barr said the damage to the downtown area would be more than $157 million. Officials said the damage to all of Tarrant County would exceed $300 million.

The coroner's office said Carl Spence, 67, was killed by a collapsing wall, and Howard D. Thornton, 52, died after a truck trailer toppled onto him.

The body of Ashlyn B. Dickens, 24, was recovered Wednesday morning along a creek. Dickens and his grandmother, Adele Warren, 62, were in a car that was swept away by rising waters as they left a Bell Helicopter facility. Warren remained missing and was presumed dead.

Another victim of the storms, Juan C. Oseguera, 19, died Wednesday afternoon at Harris Methodist Fort Worth hospital. He had suffered severe head injuries when he was hit by a softball-size hailstone in Lake Worth.

Texas Gov. George W. Bush declared Tarrant County a disaster area Wednesday. Federal Emergency Management Agency officials were poised to survey the damage to determine whether the area should receive federal aid.

This skyscraper in downtown Fort Worth lost lots of windows

The National Weather Service gauged one of Tuesday's tornadoes as an F3 at its strongest point -- a category of storms packing winds of 158 to 206 mph. This twister hit the suburb of Arlington.

The Fort Worth tornado was an F2, a category with winds of 113 to 157 mph. The storms hit just after the evening rush hour.

Local officials said 50 buildings were hit by the tornado in Fort Worth. Eight were destroyed, 27 sustained major damage, and 15 sustained minor damage.

In nearby Arlington, about 100 homes sustained major damage and another 1,000 received light to moderate damage. Many residents spent the night in their cars in their driveways rather than leave their damaged homes.

Representatives from CiCi's Pizza distributed pizzas, and the Salvation Army dispensed bottled water, sandwiches, fruit and cookies. The Tarrant County chapter of Texas Baptist Men prepared and served hot meals to more than 300 people.

The core of the downtown area in Fort Worth is closed due to glass falling from high-rise buildings

"It's total devastation everywhere you look," Mike Anderson, a Salvation Army spokesman, said of one Arlington neighborhood of mostly two-story houses of around $200,000.

One twister also stripped the brick walls off a cathedral tower as two women prayed inside.

"It looks like a battlefield and yet God brought us miraculously through," said the Rev. Bob Nichols as he surveyed the damage at Calvary Cathedral International.

In the suburb of Grand Prairie east of Arlington, 56 homes were damaged. The Red Cross said 82 people remained homeless.

Fire crews searched floor by floor Wednesday to make sure no one had been trapped or injured, even as 200-pound panes of glass were still falling hundreds of feet to the ground.

FBI agents in jackets and disposable gloves scoured the downtown area to see if any confidential documents had blown out of the heavily damaged FBI offices in the Cash America building.

"It's a concern because there might be documents out there that are not meant to be out in the open," said Lori Bailey, a spokeswoman for the FBI's Dallas office.

Agents said they believed that computers holding confidential files remained secure. Bailey said no FBI employees were seriously injured.

The hailstone death of Oseguera, whose skull was fractured by a chunk of ice that hit him at an estimated 100 mph, was an extremely rare occurrence.

"There were only two deaths by direct hail strikes reported in the 20th century" in the United States, meteorology professor Mike Biggerstaff of Texas A&M University told The Dallas Morning News.

The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.

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