North Texas cleans up after deadly storms

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GLENN HEIGHTS, Texas — Third-grader Jake Trice sifted through the debris in what was left of his classroom at Donald T. Shields Elementary Monday.
He held his hard hat under his arm and walked in his rubber boots where a tornado ripped through the school Saturday night and blew out a wall of his classroom. The weekend tornadoes killed 11 people in North Texas and damaged or destroyed almost 1,000 structures.
“I’m looking for my book,” Jake said, sorting through books, files and furniture with dozens of teachers, other students and workers.
“I liked this class,” he said.
Jake never found his book.
He was among hundreds of North Texans who continued to clean up homes, churches and businesses damaged or destroyed by the weekend tornadoes.
Teams from the National Weather Service office in Fort Worth assessed damage in northern Ellis County and other locations on Monday, and kept the number of reported tornadoes on Saturday at nine.
“We’ve determined that this was a narrow, but intense storm that caused a lot of damage,” said Mark Fox, a Weather Service meteorologist and member of the assessment team, as they examined the damage Monday afternoon at Shields Elementary.
Southwest of the school, the sanctuary of Church of the Nazarene was in pieces, destroyed by the same tornado.
In Garland, where the worst damage occurred, the tornado was classified as an EF-4, with wind speeds of 166 to200 mph, damaging 600 structures.
In Rowlett, an EF-3 tornado with wind speeds up to 165 mph, pounded 101 homes and injured 23 people.
The tornado that hit Saturday in Collin County, on the east side of Lake Lavon was confirmed as an EF-2, with wind speeds up to 135 mph.
The tornadoes killed 11 people, eight of them in vehicles in Garland. Officials began identifying the victims Monday.
The tornado in Ellis County damaged 152 homes, officials said Monday.
“It was all very horrible, but it could have been a lot worse,” Fox said. “At this school, it was the winter break, it was on Saturday night, and there was no one in the building.”
On most Saturday nights, Pastor Ron Adams, his wife, Cheryl and other members of the Church of the Nazarene are in the sanctuary preparing for the Sunday service.
But the Adamses were in Dallas this Saturday night, getting ready to watch the Dallas Mavericks play the Chicago Bulls.
“Just before the game started, we started getting messages,” Cheryl Adams said Monday. “Someone sent us a photo and we saw that the sanctuary was gone.”
The Adamses left the game before it started to find their church in pieces and their nearby home heavily damaged. Church vans were tossed around like toys. And parts of the church’s steeple were near Shields Elementary.
“God was watching over us,” Cheryl Adams said Monday.
Crews also continued Monday to gather pets displaced by the disaster and take them to shelters.
On average, North Texas has about 155 tornadoes a year, most of them in April, May and June.
The most recent deadly North Texas outbreak was in May 2013, when 16 tornadoes touched down, including an EF-4 in the Granbury area that leveled dozens of homes and killed six people.
Before Saturday, the last December tornado in North Texas came on Dec. 29, 2006, when 15 tornadoes were confirmed, mostly in Johnson County and near Groesbeck, where one person was killed.
Two EF-0 tornadoes touched down in Tarrant County in November — one in north Fort Worth and one in Keller — the fifth and sixth time tornadoes have been confirmed in that month.