Tornado in Texas
© Eric Gay/APA vehicle rests on top of a three-storey hotel after a tornado touched down in in Floresville, Texas, on Friday.

A trailer from an RV park was whirled on to the roof of a Holiday Inn, buildings were shredded and more than a foot of rain drenched Austin as storms hammered Texas on Friday, killing at least two people.

The small town of Floresville, near San Antonio, was hit by a suspected tornado early in the morning. Local news footage showed damage to power lines, homes, businesses and a high school, though no one was hurt.

The body of a driver who went missing in floodwaters was found in a hard-hit area near the Austin airport, the Travis county emergency management office said. Military crews also found a body at Camp Bullis, a military training installation north of San Antonio, a defense department spokesman said. That person was believed to be a driver whose vehicle was swept off the road by flash floodwaters.

There were reports of other tornadoes in counties including D'Hanis, 50 miles west of San Antonio, were a bank and other buildings were wrecked. Several central Texas counties remained under a tornado watch on Friday afternoon.


In and around Austin, intense rainfall caused rivers and creeks to overflow. Dozens of roads were closed, including several major routes. One man who needed to be rescued after he was caught in a flash flood shot a video from inside his car as it floated away, KVUE local news reported.


Flights were suspended at Austin-Bergstrom international airport on Friday morning after six inches of rain fell in one hour, flooding the ground floor of the control tower, officials said. The airport received 14 inches of rain between midnight and 3pm Central Time. Parts were being reopened in the afternoon, according to a statement, but dozens of flights were delayed or cancelled.

In the Hill Country, a popular tourism area west of Austin, the Blanco river in Wimberley rapidly rose from 4ft to more than 26ft, twice as high as its flood stage, though its level was receding on Friday afternoon. Police in Hays County used Twitter to urge some residents to shelter in place, while San Marcos city officials issued an evacuation order for people living along the Blanco and San Marcos rivers.

Flooding prompted Comal county, between Austin and San Antonio, to issue a local declaration of disaster to initiate its emergency management plan.

The Associated Press reported that emergency services rescued a church group from the second floor of a flooded Wimberley inn by stringing a rope between a staircase and higher ground and guiding the people across.

The area was hit by severe flooding in May, when about 30 people in Texas and Oklahoma were killed as a result of storms, including a mother and her two young children when the riverside home in Wimberley where they were staying was swept away by flood waters and smashed into a bridge.

And only last week, Texas - which in many parts had experienced a very dry summer - saw widespread rain from storms including the remnants of hurricane Patricia, meaning the ground was still sodden in places as the latest wet weather arrived.

Storms moved east towards Houston later on Friday.