IRVING, Texas — The Autos of Dallas location in Irving opened for regular business hours on Friday morning, despite the damage done to the storefront during Thursday's storms.
The National Weather Service confirmed two EF-1 tornadoes with maximum winds between 105 and 110 miler per hour caused damage in Irving on Thursday.
The NWS is still surveying damage and told WFAA on Friday morning that they are still working to determined whether the damage done to Autos of Dallas was caused by straight line winds or one of the tornadoes.
Autos of Dallas General Manager David Mullins said he walked around the property Friday morning with a surveyor from NWS to take in all of the damage.
“We probably had, I would guess, about 30 something cars that had some hail damage," Mullins said. "Oddly enough, the storm was coming in from one direction and there’s only certain parts of the cars that were hit that were facing a certain direction.”
In addition to hail damage, Mullins said the debris ripped from the roof of the store fell on top of a car that was sitting outside of the store during the storm. A power pole at the edge of the lot snapped from its base and fell on to two vehicles in the neighboring dealership's lot.
“We had customers here, and our main focus is the safety of them," Mullins said. "I had to come out to the lot when I knew it was coming and gathered my crew and any customers and bring them inside, and the minute we got inside the façade came down and the winds were blowing so hard. I’ve never seen winds like that in my life."
Although damage was done to the outside of the building, the inside of the dealership was not damaged.
"We’re still busy. We’re still open," Mullins said. "We had our contractor come out and do an assessment on the inside, and he said it’s perfectly safe to work inside so we’re open.”
Mullins said he feels lucky and blessed that no one was hurt and that the only left to do is clean up a mess.