PITTSBURGH — Investigators from the National Weather Service were in Butler and Clarion counties on Tuesday to survey damage from strong storms on Monday and determined that four tornadoes touched down.
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Tornadoes in Butler County touched down near Prospect and Eldorado.
"In this case, we are looking for a narrow, focused swath of damage,” said Matthew Kramar of the National Weather Service. “Oftentimes, trees have all fallen in the same direction and may converge just a little bit."
Kramar said the type of damage they saw was pretty typical compared to past surveys done around the area.
"I think of storm surveying as, like, a puzzle. You take the pieces of the puzzle that you have and you try to fit them into a model and try to understand what happened,” he said.
Prospect is familiar with tornadoes. On July 22, 2008, an EF-0 tornado touched down in nearly the same area. It was right across Route 488 and just down the road.
Storm damage crews from the Pittsburgh NWS confirmed that in addition to the two tornadoes in Butler County, two others touched down Monday in Clarion County, near Turkey Ridge and Cooksburg. All four tornadoes were EF-0 and were only on the ground briefly, with winds of less than 85 mph.
EF-0 is the weakest classification of tornadoes on the Enhanced Fujita Scale. By comparison, the tornado that damaged nearly 90 homes in Hempfield Township, Westmoreland County, in 2009 was an EF-2 tornado with 120 mph winds.
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Mobile Home Park Damaged By Strong Winds
High winds uprooted trees and toppled them onto cars at the Coral Ridge mobile home park in Prospect.
“I don’t know what to do. We have three cars and a motorcycle, and they’re gone,” Kimberly Ford, who lives in Coral Ridge, said. “The trees could have come on us. What fell on the trailer was just the big branches and stuff. You know, you can replace the cars, but we were in there.”
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Trees were uprooted and split in half, and big branches were thrown on top of houses.
“I knew it was getting real bad when my trailer started, like, rocking. You could feel it actually almost trying to shift off the blocks,” Jerry Weitzel, who lives in Coral Ridge, said.
Nobody in the mobile home park was injured.
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Woman Trapped in Greenhouse During Severe Storms
There were some scary moments Monday afternoon for Chris Shaffer, her greenhouse employees and a dozen customers as strong storms moved through the area.
Several of Shaffer's greenhouses along Grindel Road in Prospect were damaged.
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The greenhouses are made of thick plastic, so they are not the place you want to be in the middle of a storm.
“We ran to the boiler room and stayed there about 10 minutes until it was over,” said Shaffer, who is the owner of Jestead’s Greenhouse.
Shaffer said she knows they were lucky.
Cox Media Group
