Officials in North Texas said Thursday that they were no longer searching for survivors after a mile-wide tornado touched down here, killing at least six people and injuring dozens of others.
At least seven other people were listed as missing.
The National Weather Service said that as many as 10 tornadoes may have struck towns south of Fort Worth beginning Wednesday evening. A precise count was to be made available later Thursday, the weather service said.
Granbury, about 35 miles southwest of Fort Worth, was the hardest hit area, accounting for the vast majority of the dead and injured, said Sheriff Roger Deeds of Hood County. Names of the victims have not yet been released, but the six confirmed dead were all adults, officials said.
In Rancho Brazos, a subdivision a few miles southeast of Granbury, more than half the homes were flattened, had roofs torn off or walls knocked down, or were simply torn from foundations, officials said.
“Most all of that is heavily damaged to totally destroyed,” Sheriff Deeds said Thursday at a news conference. “It’s definitely a nightmare.”
Steve Berry, a Hood County commissioner who worked as a firefighter for 23 years, said that during a tour of the neighborhood of modular, mobile and wood-frame homes, he had witnessed “total devastation.”
He estimated that more than 100 homes had been damaged.
Many houses in the subdivision, had been built in recent years by Habitat for Humanity. Mr. Berry said the houses had been tossed around so violently that they now looked “like Tinkertoys.”
At sunrise on Thursday, teams of fire crews aided by bulldozers and other heavy equipment began picking through rubble to determine if anyone was trapped, while electric crews worked to restore power.
A few hours later, Wayne McKethan, the city manager, said that all the survivors had been found with the aid of dogs.
“Search and rescue is over,” Mr. McKethan said. “We’re now in search and recovery” — that is, searching for the dead.
He pointed to a bare slab. “There used to be a house there,” he said.
Access to the area was restricted Thursday because propane tanks had not been secured and wreckage had not been cleared. Among the damage, Mr. Berry said, was a water tower that “imploded.”
Bits of sheet metal hung from power lines and wrapped around trees, some of which had been stripped of leaves and branches so that they resembled toothpicks.
The first storms arrived in the area Wednesday about 6:30 p.m., bringing hard rain and a barrage of baseball-size hail, according to the National Weather Service. About an hour and a half later, at 8:10 p.m., the weather service issued a tornado warning and local officials began evacuating residents to shelters. People had about 20 minutes to make it to safety, officials said.
Mr. Berry said that he had believed that the severe weather had bypassed Granbury without causing significant damage when “the storm seemed to pass and back up on top of us.”
On Thursday morning, Kyle McCombs, an emergency room physician at the Lake Granbury Medical Center, where he is also chief of staff, was sitting in his Chevrolet Suburban as he waited for a street to be reopened near the Rancho Brazos neighborhood. The police had blocked roads in the area because of downed power lines.
Dr. McCombs said he had worked overnight in the emergency room.
“It’s a real mess,” he said. “We saw the storm coming in and knew there was tornadic activity.”
At about 8 p.m., he said, administrators had sounded a “code black,” or severe weather alert, with instructions to move patients to interior hallways and away from windows.
Soon after, he said, ambulances started arriving with injured people.
“We had serious, major trauma, and a lot of it,” said Dr. McCombs, 47. “For a hospital of our size, we’ve never seen a mass trauma event like this.”
The emergency room typically sees as many as 65 people a day, he said, but on Wednesday night, “we were more than half that all at once.”
Dr. McCombs said patients had come with a broad range of injuries, including severe lacerations and spinal and skull fractures.
He said many staff members had come in “off duty to assist. That’s what really saved us.”
He added, “We all just started divvying up patients.”
About a dozen people with more serious injuries were transferred to hospital trauma centers in Fort Worth, he said.
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