leaders personally, but from what i ve seen on tv, the city of arlington was evidently hit very hard, and i believe lancaster as well was hit pretty hard. mr. mayor, thank you for the time this afternoon, and again, all of our thoughts go to everybody in every community in texas this tuesday afternoon suffering from an extraordinary display of natural force in a very, very densely populated area. the best thing we can report today is the effectiveness of the tornado warning system, so while the storms have been intense and obviously have been in a heavily densely populated area, the ability to anticipate their arrival for most at this point has, at least for now, kept the number of casualties reported down. we ll take a momentary break. we re back with you here right after this. i take insulin,
they ve been running into that cooler surface air made so by the cooler rain, so it does bring down the threat. it s not nothing, but it does bring down the threat a little bit. so the warm air is effectively fuel for the fire. thank you, carl. i want to turn our attention to one of the communities, burleson, texas. joining us on the phone is the town s mayor, ken shedder. the storms have already hit this region just south of ft. worth. mr. mayor, what s the damage assessment? well, we are fortunate, and our city in burleson, most of the damage here is from lightning strikes. we had a few trees on fire, a downed power line, an electrical box fire, but no personal injuries and most of our work really involved deploying resources to communities just outside our city helping manage the situation there. yeah, and that was my follow-up question. what is your capacity having had the benefit up to this point of
there s been significant development of the exurbs, if you will, to the north. how much development has it hit through the dallas-ft. worth area? i can say our city has grown by about 75% in about that time, so today our population is 37,000, where the last time we dealt with storms like this, it was closer to 20,000. so she s right about that. mr. mayor, thank you for the time and all the best in your efforts to help your community navigate what will obviously be, at its best, very disruptive, and at its worst, a tragedy. we are tracking the latest on an incredible series of thunderstorms that have been pounding the fourth largest urban area in america. we are also, however, tracking politics. today is another primary day.
i couldn t see debris under it, but that was probably ten minutes ago, maybe. okay. you re listening to the nbc affiliate in dallas-ft. worth. joe holeran is the mayor where the first funnel was spotted today at 12:30 this afternoon. what s your damage estimate? we re quite fortunate. we did have a confirmed tornado in this city but didn t have any damage and didn t have any injuries. just outside the city limits, we did have a couple houses that had the shingles torn off. i believe there were a couple horses that had to be put down. we re in a rural area, and i believe there are several barns that had some damage, but the first one, we did not have any damage within the city limits. we had another one about 45 minutes later on the other side of town just outside the city limits, but there was not any damage from that one, either. how much information have you been able to gather from other community leaders? i ve not talked to any of the