There were only two tornadoes in the six-county Dallas-Fort Worth region and none in Tarrant County.
Mark Fox, the National Weather Service’s warning coordination meteorologist, is concerned that North Texans might become complacent about preparing for severe weather.
“People tend to remember the last thing that happened,” Fox said. “It’s been awhile.”
The most recent deadly tornado in North Texas came on May 15, 2013, when an EF-4 tornado packing 180 mph winds struck the Rancho Brazos neighborhood just outside of Granbury. Six people were killed by the tornado, one of 19 that touched down that day in North Texas.
It’s a grim reminder that we reside in tornado alley.
“I don’t think it’s a matter of if, it’s a matter of when,” Fox said.
And as the population continues to boom in DFW — especially in suburban areas to the north and south — the chances increase each year that a tornado will strike a populated area.
“We’re just making our target a little bigger,” Fox said.
Fox points to the April 2, 1957 Dallas tornado as an example, an EF-3 that killed 10 people.
“If you superimpose today’s population growth on the path of that tornado, you will get an Oklahoma City-type tornado,” Fox said. “There’s more people, more schools, more buildings now than there were back then.”
Tornadoes and Twitter
In some ways, however, Fox thinks we may be better prepared for a tornado similar to the one that tore through downtown Fort Worth on March 28, 2000.
While many people were caught off-guard by that late-afternoon EF-3 tornado, Fox said our hyper-connected world would help spread the word. Besides constant updates on Twitter, numerous smart phone apps also provide live weather alerts.
“With all of the social media we now have, I think everyone would know it’s coming,” Fox said.
The city of Fort Worth now has 20,666 subscribers signed up to the Nixle notification system that will send out alerts as storms approach.
After storm sirens sound, updates from Nixle come “in additional emails and text alerts confirming that severe weather,” said Juan Ortiz, Fort Worth’s emergency management coordinator.
‘Only Takes One Episode’
How soon those warnings will be needed remains to be seen.
While rain is in the immediate forecast, WFAA meteorologist Pete Delkus doesn’t see any major severe weather outbreaks happening over the next two weeks, but conditions could change later this spring.
“I think it will be very interesting in the middle of April and the month of May,” Delkus said. ‘We may have a little later start to the season but it only takes one episode.”
Any uptick in activity may come as a surprise to many.
The DFW area, which the National Weather Service defines as Tarrant, Dallas, Denton, Collin, Ellis and Johnson counties, has an average of six tornadoes per year. Texas averages 150 tornadoes a year and recorded 42 last year.
“Even if we have a more normal year it’s going to seem so much more active,” Fox said.
The experience of living through the 2013 storm has had an effect on Granbury-area residents, said Hood County Judge Darrell Cockerham.
“When the clouds come up and start rolling and there are tornado warnings, people will start looking up at the skies,” Cockerham said. “I don’t know if everybody would have done that before the last storm.”
©2015 the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
