By: Rachael Tan
On Saturday, Governor Greg Abbott visited Perryton in the Texas Panhandle, where more than 1,000 citizens were left without electricity, and 3 were left dead after a tornado on Thursday.
“At times of events like these, Texans come together,” Abbott told reporters as he signed a disaster declaration while visiting that he said would “trigger all the resources the state can bring
to bear, so it could accelerate the ability to rebuild.”
However, Texas may not be done with disaster yet. W. Nim Kidd, chief of the Texas Division of Emergency Management, warned that more severe weather was forecast for the area late Saturday, bringing rain, high winds and possibly more tornadoes.
Not only do Texans have to watch out for tornados, they also have to watch out for heat. Communities from Houston to New Orleans opened cooling centers to try and decrease hot temperatures towards the U.S south on Saturday. Allison Prater, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Fort Worth, Texas, said the air temperature Saturday in the Dallas area could reach 94 F, but high humidity would make it feel like 105 F.
The National Weather Service issued excessive heat warnings through Saturday night along the Gulf Coast from Brownsville, Texas, to Houston. It said heat indexes ranging from near 115 degrees Fahrenheit in Houston to near 120 F at Brownsville and Corpus Christi in Texas.
“The reason we’re having such heat is there is a lot of moisture being pulled up from the Gulf of Mexico,” Prater said. “That’s working with the warmer temperatures to induce … that ‘feels like’ temperature.”
Temperature causes many problems, but the tornado prior to the sea wave killed two women and an 11-year-old boy when it slammed into Perryton. On Saturday, authorities upgraded the intensity of the twister to EF-3, saying it packed winds of up to 140 mph (225 kph).
In Louisiana, the National Weather Service projected daytime temperatures through Monday at about 94 F with high humidity and heat index values as high as 112 F.
This makes the cooling shelters even more important to those who were left without electricity, resulting in no air conditioning and left with a flaming disaster.
This is such a bold structure!! And I’m so glad to see you continuing to push yourself, and creating new ways to make articles, and think through the news. This was an especially hard article to write, because there is so much information from so many different places.
I think you are off to an excellent start by moving between the two main subjects in each paragraph (heat and tornado). But while the contrast works well in the first 2 paragraphs, it becomes confusing to switch back and forth after that. There is a reason why most people don’t read two books at the same time, paragraph by paragraph. To combat this confusion, you need to build in some transition-some connection or contrast between the subjects you are writing between. I gave you one example, can you do the rest?