Tornado damage in St. Mary (photo KTJJ radio)
Several tornadoes were reported in Missouri last night, including in northwest Missouri’s Caldwell County and near eastern Missouri’s Farmington, Fredericktown, and St. Mary. The National Weather Service EF-3 damage in Fredericktown. The NWS is still assessing that site.
James Rogers of Fredericktown called into Missourinet affiliate KREI in Farmington during the storm.
“So right now I’m actually sitting here and I mean, you can see not even a foot in front of your face. There’s destruction everywhere. I’m talking about trees down. Powerlines down. There’s just debris everywhere,” he said. “I ended up getting in my car because I’m stuck on the side of the road and I’m getting hit with what looks to be hail. My back windshield actually is busted out and I’m having to fit inside the car while the rain is going in and everything. I mean, it’s just insane. I mean, there’s lightning, when everything here maybe is about five minutes ago. I’ve watched the tornado come through and just rip up all types of stuff.”
A Sunday afternoon tornado in Linn County’s Purdin has been rated an EF-2 with estimated max winds of 120 mph, according to the NWS-Kansas City.
Jarod Maples, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in St. Louis, told station KREI the storms on Sunday were rare for this time of year:
“What we’d seen as a pretty classic setup for a fall transitional pattern where you have a pretty large upper-level system that starts to develop over the central part of the country and as that evolved and come into the Midwest, all the ingredients came together just in the right time to result in some showers and thunderstorms over Missouri, which strengthened through the afternoon-evening hours and as they continue to truck into the St. Louis region into Southeast Missouri they produced damaging tornadoes and winds.”
Tornado damage in Fredricktown MO (NWS photo)
National Weather Service teams are surveying the damage on site.
“They’ll go on the ground and actually look at structural integrity, different types of instructors because something like a pole barn isn’t going to stand up as well as a decently built home that has anchors in the studs and so forth. So they get down to the detail and they look at these structures and what these structures are made of, and what the wind ratings are on these structures to be able to determine what type of tornado or the extent of the tornado that moved through that area,” Maples explained.
In mid-Missouri, teams from the NWS report two EF-0 tornadoes hit the Sedalia area Sunday: one south-southeast of Sedalia and the other just east along HWY 50. There were no injuries or deaths.
(WE WILL CONTINUE TO UPDATE THIS STORY)
