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Houston-area tornado damage causes major road closures
Damage caused by Tuesday’s severe weather has prompted closures of several major roads in the southeast Houston area.
The Pasadena Police Department announced in a Facebook post Wednesday morning that several roadways in and around the city will be “temporarily closed… due to the heavy damage sustained from the tornado.”
According to Pasadena PD, the following roads will be closed for now:
- Fairmont Parkway @ Mickey Gilley Boulevard.
- Vista Road @ Mickey GIlley Boulevard.
- 5150 Burke Road (animal shelter).
- Iroquois Drive / Ponca Street
- Spencer Highway from Space Center Boulevard to Lilac Street, including the Beltway 8 intersection.
“We ask that the public avoid these areas to provide immediate access to first responders and utility companies,” Pasadena PD added in the post, which also includes a list of the many non-working traffic lights in the area.
The closures follow the first ever Tornado Emergency issued in the southeast Houston region: Tuesday’s storms whipped up a tornado that tore through Pasadena, Deer Park, and Baytown, causing significant structural damage to businesses and residences and forcing dozens to sleep in shelters Tuesday night.
The storm has also caused widespread, ongoing power outages across the region, with downed power lines and damaged transmission feeds leaving thousands in the dark Wednesday morning.
More than 218,000 CenterPoint Energy customers alone were affected by outages in the past 24 hours, with nearly 22,000 still without power as of Wednesday morning around 10:30 a.m. Outages are concentrated in and around the southeast Houston area, with about 14,000 near Pasadena and several thousand more in Deer Park and Baytown.