Tornadoes In The Aiken, SC Area

Walt in South Carolina writes:

We had a pretty scary front with tornadoes come through here Saturday around 6 pm. It was serious enough that the local TV stations pre-empted normal programming to have about 90 minutes of nonstop weather coverage. As you can see from the atteched map, there were several tornado cells, spaced about 30 miles apart, and going ESE. In the vicinity of the tracks, there was 2 inches of rain. My house is between tracks; we got only 0.75 inches. The storm moved eastward at 55 miles per hour - I didn't know storms could move that fast.

I never heard so much thunder. For 10 minutes, it was continuous - there was not even one second without thunder. At one point, the wind blew strongly up the street, and then changed direction and blew strongly down the street. I thought - O Shit, here it comes - but it missed my neighborhood. We got hail, and one window was blown into my house, but no trees are down on my street, and we never lost power.

The tornado passed through the upper middle class development of Beaver Creek, 3 miles south of my house. Many trees down, several houses with missing roofs, and one tree which fell through a roof, all the way down to ground level. Nobdy was hurt; the people weren't home.

In the low-income town of Clearwater, a phone pole was snapped off. I figure it must be hard to blow down a phone pole; it doesn't present much surface area to the wind. Many houses without roofs, hundreds on trees down, and a post office messed up. The Red Cross set up in the Clearwater Bi-Lo, and gave out motel vouchers for the people with damaged homes.

You can see pictures at wjbf.com.

I wonder how low the air pressure got?

Oooh! That is frightening! Nothing matches a tornado for completely changing people’s lives in a minute.

California is usually free of tornadoes, but I once saw a funnel cloud, hanging halfway to the ground, passing over the Davis/Woodland area. Apparently it finally reached the ground in an uninhabited area, miles to the north. And once, a small tornado hit some power lines near Cal Expo (CA State Fairgrounds), several miles from I work. I noticed the flickering, but didn’t think a thing of it, except to save my documents on the computer.

Nothing like what you experienced, though.