2 dead, 7 injured when home under construction in Texas collapses during storm

Two people were killed and at least seven others injured when a house under construction collapsed during a storm in Conroe, Texas on Tuesday afternoon, officials said.

Conroe Deputy Fire Chief Mike Legoudes Jr. said responding firefighters found two people dead at the scene. The seven injured were transported to area hospitals. Their conditions were unknown.

Authorities did not immediately identify any of the victims.

“We saw hail outside, the sky turned very dark and it rained very hard, 10 to 15 minutes,” said a woman who lives nearby, CBS affiliate KHOU. “And after that, the rain kind of stopped. But around the same time, we were hearing ambulances and fire engines.”

Legoudes said the house that collapsed was in the early stages of construction. “Looks like they were working on the second story, no drywall or anything like that yet,” he said.

Legoudes also noted that there were “quite a few people here when we arrived, working on different houses.”

Legoudes could not confirm whether the storm was directly responsible for the collapse.

“It’s hard to say,” he said. “It arrived just after the storm passed and was along the predicted path of the storm. So that’s a possibility, but it will take a bit of time to figure that out.”

Aerial footage from CBS affiliate KHOU captured the extent of the damage to the structure, which had been reduced to piles of plywood. The collapse occurred in a housing estate with several other homes also in various states of construction, but none appear to have sustained comparable damage.

Conroe is located approximately 40 miles north of Houston.

The town of Huntsville, about 30 miles north of Conroe, also reported extensive storm damage, with several downed trees and power lines.

As of Tuesday evening, just over 12,000 customers in the area were without power, according to utility tracker PowerOutage.us.