Hundreds of thousands without power in Dallas County on Monday after Sunday severe storms

Hundreds of thousands of people remained without power Monday morning after severe thunderstorms blew through North Texas on Sunday afternoon.

Oncor said there were about 214,000 people without power as of 2 p.m. Monday and it could be days before power is restored to everyone. The bulk of the outages are in Dallas County, about 200,000.

Across North Dallas and East Dallas, the storm tore down stop signs and large trees. Officials at the National Weather Service said winds reached up to 80 miles per hour at the storm’s peak on Sunday.

As soon as the storm passed, people began working to clean up the debris in their neighborhood.

“I’ve lived here 40 years and I’ve never seen a storm like this in my entire life,” said North Dallas resident Brian Rafferty. “It was a clear day, like this, and all of a sudden the wind just started howling and within five minutes into the storm it tore down this entire tree and as you can see it’s just a mess.”

Dallas officials said their priority is getting traffic lights up and running. They ask residents to call 311 to report outages or downed trees.

Several school districts canceled summer programs Monday due to the power outages -- Dallas, Richardson, Mesquite and Highland Park ISDs. Many of the campuses are without power and summer school, camps and feeding programs were canceled for the day.

Airlines were also trying to recover from flight cancellations on Sunday that leaked into Monday. Nearly 200 flights to and from DFW Airport were cancelled on Monday and 60 were delayed. Dallas Love Field was faring better, with just one cancellation and 13 delays.

The storm was deadly, killing one person when a crane collapsed onto a midrise apartment building near downtown Dallas. Several other people were hospitalized due to injuries.