Tornado Leaves Trail of Destruction in Houston Suburb

A tornado tore through the Houston suburb of Deer Park, on January 24, leaving a trail of destruction in its wake.

Footage from Jonathan Dougherty shows the aftermath of the twister, with cars and buildings badly damaged, trees and power lines knocked down, and debris littering the ground.

“Pretty unbelievable that nobody was hurt,” Dougherty says in the footage.

According to bulletins from the City of Deer Park, only minor injuries were reported, and the damage was being assessed. Credit: Jonathan Dougherty via Storyful

Video transcript

JONATHAN DOUGHERTY: All right, just doing some post survey damage here. We got roofs that have been damaged here at the Deer Creek Apartments, cars damaged. So walking through here. Fences and trees down.

Building material here. More cars damaged here. Let's see.

[DISTANT WHIRRING]

Looks like some of these apartments took it a little bit worse than others. They're working pretty fast on getting trees down. That building near the pool has been hit pretty darn hard. Got a lot of bricks pulled down, where it ripped this off.

There we go. Major damage here. This tree got pulled out of the ground. Building roof was pretty much torn off of the laundry facility. Yeah, pretty bad damage here.

And another building taking a direct hit, ripping the brick siding off. Fences down, trees on cars. Leasing center hit pretty hard.

Got some more roof and structural damage. Roof lift off that apartment near the fitness center. Pretty unbelievable that nobody was hurt. Thank God.

- You take the same house and put it at our land different. Reach out, touch your neighbor, and [INAUDIBLE].

JONATHAN DOUGHERTY: OK, so found some more intense damage here in Deer Park. The UPS store here and then this building took some pretty major damage. You can see here. Got metal wrapped around. You got this big air conditioner unit. Downed power lines.

Yeah, it's some pretty major damage to flip an air conditioning unit like that over.

Yeesh.