This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

A woman died and at least six people were injured when a crane collapsed on to an apartment building in Dallas amid severe thunderstorms early on Sunday afternoon.

Dallas Fire-Rescue spokesman Jason Evans told reporters first responders searching the Elan City Lights building found a woman inside an apartment who was later pronounced dead.

Two people were taken to hospital in critical condition and three in non-critical but serious condition, Evans said. One person sustained a minor injury and was discharged.

The names of the injured and the woman who died were not immediately available.

“We have some life-finding dogs on location,” Evans said, “trying to help go inside some of the zones we’re not sending first responders into”.

Evans later said first responders had searched every accessible apartment and found no one inside. Residents living in apartments that were inaccessible because of damage from the crane, he said, were either out at the time of the collapse or were among those taken to hospital.

Jason Whitely (@JasonWhitely) NEW VIDEO from an eyewitness at the apartment complex on the east side of the Dallas skyline badly damaged by a falling crane in this afternoon’s severe thunderstorm. (Warning about the language.) pic.twitter.com/6hKUGFEUOy

On its website, the Elan City Lights is described as a “residence defined by breathtaking views, modern interiors, next-level amenities, personalized services and an unrivalled location”.

Video shot by cellphone and posted to Twitter showed severe damage to a parking garage, cars piled on top of each other between collapsed floors, and firefighters escorting a stretcher out of the apartments building, in which a section of the top three floors had collapsed.

The crane fell as strong winds, heavy rain and hail battered parts of north Texas. The National Weather Service issued a severe thunderstorm watch for the greater Dallas/Fort Worth area, warning of heavy rain, damaging gusts and large hail. It also issued a flood advisory for parts of the region and said winds could exceed 70mph.

Among witnesses interviewed by the Dallas Morning News, Yesenia Bosquez said the crane crashed into her top-floor apartment. After an agonising wait that she said “felt like a year”, authorities told her her husband was injured but had survived, holding on to the family dog.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Isaiah Allen, a resident of the damaged apartments, holds on to his dog. Photograph: Shaban Athuman/AP

Another witness, Isaiah Allen, told the newspaper he was in his apartment when he heard what he thought was a tremendous clap of thunder.

“I saw that the crane had actually fell straight through the building,” he was quoted as saying, “and had destroyed a good eight to 10 apartments and so there’s like floors and stuff falling through”.

Allen told the newspaper he saw a bloodied woman trapped in a second-floor apartment.

Evans told reporters: “This is a really challenging situation in that I cannot personally recall that we’ve had a crane collapse involving an already inhabited building … much less an occupied residential five-storey high-rise building.”

Evans could not say if construction work was going on at the time of the collapse.

“Our hearts go out to everyone who has been impacted by this incident,” he said. “Our hope is that the damage that has been inflicted thus far is where it stops.”