Though it was on the ground in the Port Orchard area for around a minute, it did a lot of damage. One house lost its entire roof and nearby houses lost parts of theirs. There are a lot of large trees that came down or were snapped in half and power lines are down, too. According to KIRO7 meteorologist Morgan Palmer, debris was pulled aloft up to 6000 feet into the air. As of the last report I heard, no one has been injured but there was concern of a natural gas leak, so people are being kept out of that neighborhood. You can see the news report here. We also made the CBS News, or at least the western edition.
The Big Crow and I live about 20 miles southeast of Port Orchard. As we were leaving Starbucks this afternoon, I spotted somemammatus clouds. They’re rare here but I know they’re often associated with severe weather. So, I wasn’t too surprised when I heard about the tornado once I got home, even though I know they weren’t part of the same cell that produced it.
Tornadoes don’t occur often in Washington state and this is one of the strongest ever recorded. When I was a kid in the sixties, one passed a few miles from our house near Sea-Tac Airport and took off part of a pine tree in a friend’s yard.
I remember a tornado touching down in Vancouver, WA, back in the early 1970s. I was very young and don’t remember much about it, other than “so that happened”.
Yeah, the Vancouver one was probably the worst in recorded Washington history. It was rated as an F3. The one yesterday will probably be rated as an F2.
The images of this tornado that get me the most are the ones showing about a block’s worth of second growth Douglas fir forest which had been flattened. They were around 60 to 80 feet tall and their shallow root systems make them vulnerable in strong winds. There were plenty more down on the more populated blocks, too, damaging many homes and cars.
Still no reports of anyone being hurt. Pretty amazing, that.
Hey, **G0sp3l, **Seattle does too have trailer parks. They’re just a well-kept secret.
I grew up in the South and I’ve seen the aftermath of too many tornadoes. The randomness of the destruction can be amazing, rows of houses untouched followed by an apocalyptic wasteland followed by another pristine street. All within the same 150 yard area.
According to my dad, back at the time, the one in Vancouver went right down a main street, taking out every building along one side, then made a little jig around a tavern before continuing on with the next building.
Also according to him (he was in the Washington State Patrol), there was a new meteorologist at the Portland airport across the river who had recently moved up here from Kansas. Apparently, the guy had looked over the weather patterns and recommended issuing a tornado alert. Nobody listened because, “we don’t get tornadoes here”.
This is what I remember, but I was in first grade so it might not be completely accurate:
We lived on the corner of Louisiana Dr and Tulsa Ave and attended St Joseph’s school. I remember being at recess or lunch and lot’s of strong winds and the teachers looking up at the big tree next to the school, and I remember them sending kids home.
We lived right next to school so we walked home and sat inside the house as the winds got worse. At one point our metal garbage cans got picked up from behind the fence and thrown out into the middle of the street. A little bit after that the news came on and said a tornado had just touched down.
Hey, we must be the same age - I was in first grade that year, too. We lived out in Salmon Creek, just above Hazel Dell, and I attended Salmon Creek Elementary School. But just the year before we had lived in an apartment on Rossiter Lane, just off Fourth Plain (can’t recall exactly where that is in Vancouver without consulting a map, but it was much more central than Salmon Creek), but had we remained there I would have ended up attending Fort Vancouver HS rather than Columbia River HS. I attended John Rogers Elementary for kindergarten.
We only lived there for one year and then moved back to Bellevue. I had fun down there, it seemed like an adventure. They had streets that were named after states which seemed really cool compared to what I was used to (numbers). They also had one of those traveling fairs with rides and things setup in the parking lot behind my house, that was pretty fun.
I don’t remember the school names you mentioned from when I was down there, the only other one I remember was Marshall, my little brother went there (probably for kindergarten).
