Storm grounds air traffic

Mark Seachrist, owner of Zetti's Pizza in Kilgore provided over a 100 pizzas to keep up with the demand from stranded air passengers at ETRA.

When a storm front led American Airlines to cancel all its flights into DFW Airport yesterday, nine American flights were re-directed to East Texas Regional Airport.

And Mark Seachrist's crew at Zetti's Pizza was sent scrambling. Virginia Hall, East Texas Regional Airport manager said due to a storm front which closed DFW Airport, air traffic was re-directed to ETRA.

As of 1 p.m. on Tuesday, nine aircraft - one American Eagle flight and eight American Airlines flights, were stranded on the apron at ETRA.

They were forced to land at ETRA to wait out the storm.

Airline passengers were stranded and the airlines were doing what they could for them. One of the things American did was provide food. They needed pizza and the called Zetti's in Kilgore.

Seachrist, owner of Zetti's, said he was pretty happy when the orders started coming in. First it was 30. Then it was 60. Then it got to 90. After more then 100 large pizzas, the store was running out of ingredients to take care of their regular customers.

"It was wild," he laughed. "Our driver made a bunch of trips. And then every one of the pizzas had to go through the security screening. But we got it done."

Hall said the airport itself was operating as normal, but due to the number of planes forced to land there, the tarmac was at capacity. "If we needed to land another plane we could find room," said Hall.

Hall said some passengers were getting rental cars to drive to Dallas while others were in the terminal waiting out the storm.

The series of storms packing strong winds and heavy rains hit North Texas early Tuesday, grounding hundreds of flights, forcing an airport control tower to evacuate briefly and sending floodwaters spilling into Dallasarea streets.

The rains and winds with gusts near 70 mph led American Airlines to cancel flights scheduled from 11 a.m. through the remainder of Tuesday at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport - affecting some 700 departures and ar- rivals. More than 100 of the carrier's flights headed to DFW were diverted, spokesman Tim Wagner said, including those that stopped off at Gregg County.

"Everyone is working hard to keep passengers as comfortable as possible in the terminals," airport spokesman Ken Capps said.

It's unclear how many travelers were affected by the cancellations, but airport officials estimate about 160,000 passengers pass through DFW each day.

Federal Aviation Administration officials evacuated DFW's west tower for about 15 minutes after seeing a funnel cloud over a highway. A funnel cloud was also spotted over Lake Lewisville, just north of the airport.

At Dallas Love Field, some 20 Southwest flights were canceled. Another 20 were diverted and many other flights were delayed, at most for three hours, said airline spokeswoman Ashley Rogers.

Street flooding was reported around the Dallas-Fort Worth area, but there were no reports of injuries by Tuesday afternoon.

In the Dallas suburb of Lancaster, Ten Mile Creek spilled its banks after daylong rains, flooding at least one house and leaving a handful of cars stuck in watery streets. Television video showed officials bringing rescue boats to the area, though it was unclear if anyone was stranded.

The storms were among several battering North, Central and East Texas that were expected to continue into the night.

A tornado watch was issued until Tuesday evening for East Texas, and a flash flood watch was in effect from North to East Texas through Wednesday morning.

Some 2-3 inches of rain had fallen by Tuesday afternoon and another 1-2 inches were expected by evening, said Tara Dudzik, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Fort Worth.

Weather also led to cancellation of college baseball games in Waco, Fort Worth and Abilene.

The pattern of storms was expected to move out by Wednesday morning, Dudzik said.