A rare tornado touched down in a Los Angeles suburb, ripping roofs off a line of commercial buildings and sending the debris twisting into the sky and across a city block, injuring one person.
The National Weather Service sent teams to assess damage in Montebello and later confirmed that a tornado had touched down around 11:20 a.m. Wednesday.
The weather service said that the tornado was an EF1, a measurement on the Enhanced Fujita Scale that indicates it had winds of 86 mph to 110 mph (138 kph to 177 kph). That made it the strongest tornado to hit the Los Angeles metropolitan area since March 1983, the weather service said.
“It’s definitely not something that’s common for the region,” said meteorologist Rose Schoenfeld with the weather service.
One person was injured and was taken to a hospital in Montebello, said Alex Gillman, a city spokesman. He didn’t know the severity of the injury.
Michael Turner could hear the winds get stronger from inside his office at the 33,000-square-foot (3,065-square-meter) warehouse he owns just south of downtown Montebello. When the lights started flickering, he went outside to find his employees gazing up at the ominous sky. He brought everyone inside.
“It got very loud. Things were flying all over the place,” Turner said. “The whole factory became a big dustbowl for a minute. Then when the dust settled, the place was just a mess.”
Nobody was hurt, but the gas line was severed, fire sprinklers broke, all the skylights shattered and a 5,000-square-foot (465-square-meter) section of roof was “just gone,” Turner said. He said his polyester fiber business, Turner Fiberfill, could be closed for months.
“I’ve been in California since 1965. Never seen anything like this,” Turner said. “Earthquakes — we’re used to that.”
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