Thunderstorm Wind — De Soto, Louisiana

2017-05-28 · near Trenton, De Soto, Louisiana

Event narrative

A tree fell on a vehicle that was traveling west of Hudson Darby Road, just east of Highway 71. Louisiana State Police reported that a 21 year-old male passenger sitting in the rear seat sustained fatal injuries from the falling tree. The 52 year-old male driver and a 59 year-old front seat passenger sustained moderate injuries from the incident and were transported to University Health Hospital in Shreveport for treatment.

Wider weather episode

Overnight showers and thunderstorms which held together into the morning hours of Sunday May 28th, moved into Northern Louisiana from the northwest during the morning hours after daybreak. Isolated severe thunderstorms developed near Bossier City during the mid-morning hours, producing numerous reports of penny to quarter size hail. These storms mostly dissipated by midday, leaving numerous outflow boundaries across the area. Meanwhile, a warm front moving northward into the area resulted in dew points quickly rising from the mid 60s to the mid 70s with its passage. This front stalled out near the Interstate 30 corridor of Northeast Texas, and south of this boundary, scattered thunderstorms quickly developed by mid-afternoon and spread east across East Texas near and south of the Interstate 20 corridor. These storms rapidly intensified during peak afternoon heating and instability, and produced numerous reports of wind damage across extreme Eastern Texas and North Louisiana.

In addition to widespread straight line winds which exceeded 80-90 mph at times as they organized into a large scale bow echo, isolated tornadoes also touched down south and east of Natchitoches. Training storms moving west to east also producing brief flash flooding at some locations. These storms overall had only shown very slight weakening trends by the time they entered Central Louisiana after 10 pm that evening. In the storms' wake, over 103,000 customers were left without power across East Texas and Western Louisiana in the AEP SWEPCO coverage area, which was the 4th worst storm (with outages) in the company's 105 year history.

View location on OpenStreetMap → (31.9255, -93.7101)

Source: NOAA Storm Events Database, event_id 691694. Narrative written by the NWS forecast office that issued the report.