Several tornados skipped across Wise, Denton and Cooke counties Thursday night. A freight train derailed during the storm early Friday morning. Seventeen cars piled up on the track and four railroad workers were hurt, according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
It’s not over yet. The area is in store for a lot more rain, thunder and lightning. One Denton County woman says, she’s ready for round two.
Tiffany Null got about as close as you can get to a tornado last night, and watched it tear across her property northwest of Krum from her back porch.
"All the sudden the news cut out and my Dad went to the back door and said there it is, there’s the tornado," she said. "So I put the kids in the bath tub, and me, my mom and my dad went out to the back porch and watched it go across the back pasture."
Null took a striking photo of the funnel cloud looming over farmland and dwarfing nearby outbuildings. She finds severe weather fascinating, but at the same time, she’s a little unsettled by how close the tornado got before she even knew it was there.
"You know everybody talks about, you know when you hear that freight train sound you need to take cover. We never heard anything. Nothing."
Null says her camera will be ready if another round of wild weather descends on North Texas. The experts say that’s likely. Victor Murphy with the National Weather Service in Fort Worthsays get ready for buckets of rain.
"In general, the models are showing the DFW area poised to get 5 to 10 inches of rainfall in the next week or so," he said.
Five to 10 inches of rain. That’s on top of a deluge last night that dumped five inches on one spot near the Red River.
That may sound like a glorious prediction in drought-stricken North Texas. Murphy says, not so fast.
"We may be seeing a little bit too much of a good thing, if anything. I think for the next week or so the threat of flooding and flash flooding is very, very enhanced, or very, very elevated. Very imminent for North Texas."
All this rain has dented the drought so much so that all of Texas may be out of “exceptional drought” status by next week. That hasn’t been the case since October of 2010.
Definitely good news, but Murphy doesn’t want that to take away from how serious these storms can be.
"Please be alert to flash flooding, have alternate ways home, don’t drive around barricades. Our slogan is "Turn Around, Don’t Drown.""
After last night’s close encounter with a tornado, Tiffany Null says her new slogan might be, “I wish we had a basement."
"We’re definitely looking into a storm shelter though," she said. That’s something we don’t have that we’re like, yeah, we might want to look into that."
And with the stormy seven day forecast North Texas is facing down, she’s probably not the only one
