A powerful storm brought heavy rain, strong winds and power outages to parts of the south-central United States Tuesday, leaving hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses without power in parts of Texas and Louisiana.

National Weather Service forecasters said the low-pressure system began a slow, multi-day journey from Texas to the Great Lakes on Monday. As it headed east, severe weather was forecast to expand into the Gulf Coast, the mid-Atlantic and the Midwest regions through Wednesday.

As the storm intensifies, AccuWeather meteorologists said severe weather and storms will be capable of spinning up tornadoes into Wednesday across the region.

All of south Texas was placed under a severe thunderstorm watch through Tuesday night into early Wednesday, according to the weather service. The highest risk of flooding was in the Texas Panhandle Tuesday night and the mid-South on Wednesday, the weather service said.

Large hail, damaging wind gusts and isolated tornadoes were the primary threats to the region, the weather service said. The threatening forecast led organizers of the Texas Eclipse Festival to end the celebration early Monday and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to activate emergency response resources.

Wednesday weather forecast:Severe storm to unleash heavy rain, large hail and possible tornadoes across southern US

Texas power outage map

As of 7:23 a.m. ET Wednesday, there were over 140,000 power outages reported across Texas, according to a USA TODAY power outage tracker.

There were over 50,000 outages reported in Harris County, by far the most of any county in the state.

Contributing: Christopher Cann & Thao Nguyen, USA TODAY

Gabe Hauari is a national trending news reporter at USA TODAY. You can follow him on X @GabeHauari or email him at [email protected].