Rare Los Angeles Tornado Rips Building Roofs Leaving One Injured

On Wednesday, something rare happened in a Los Angeles suburb – a tornado touched down! It ripped off the roofs of commercial buildings and sent debris flying across a city block. One person was injured from this.

Experts from the National Weather Service went to Montebello to see how bad it was. They confirmed that a tornado had passed through at around 11:20am. According to meteorologist Rose Schoenfeld, this event is not typical for that area.

Someone got hurt in Montebello and was taken to a hospital. We do not know how bad the injury was.

Michael Turner, who owns a giant warehouse near downtown Montebello, noticed that the wind began to blow stronger. The lights also started to flicker. He pulled his employees inside his office for safety.

“It was really loud and things were flying around the factory,” Turner said. “After it cleared, the place looked like a major disaster happened – no one was hurt though. A gas line was broken, fire sprinklers broke off, all the windows smashed, and a section of the roof that was about 5000 square feet disappeared!” Turner mentioned his business (called Turner Fiberfill) might be closed for months because of this.

Mr. Turner said he had lived in California since 1965 but he’d never experienced something like this before. He said they are used to having earthquakes, however.

The result of the natural disaster was a lot of rubble and destruction over an entire city block. The fire department checked 17 buildings and 11 of them were deemed unsafe to go into. Furthermore, some cars were damaged as well.

A strong Pacific storm caused some dangerous weather in California, resulting in two deaths and injuries to a police officer. High winds knocked down a tree on the officer, sending him to the hospital with critical wounds.

The weather service sent some people to Carpinteria, a city in Santa Barbara County, to check out what happened there on Tuesday. It turns out that a tornado went through the mobile home park and made gusts of wind as fast as 75 miles (120 kilometers) per hour. This caused damage to about 25 homes.

This was the last time before Tuesday where the Los Angeles weather office sent teams for an assessment like this. That was in 2016 in Ventura County near Fillmore and then they figured out that a small tornado had touched down.

The Ventura County Sheriff’s Office issued a warning on Tuesday night that a tornado was heading towards Point Mugu, which is near Malibu. However, the warning was later canceled and they tweeted that no tornado had actually touched down.

The storm was slowly fading away in California, moving from north to south and even deeper inland to the Southwest, Four Corners area, central Rockies and southern Rockies. On Tuesday, some people living in the northern part of Arizona were told to start getting ready for evacuating due to high water levels in rivers and reservoirs.

Tuesday brought some nasty weather to both San Francisco Bay and Monterey Bay, due to an abnormally low barometric pressure in the eastern Pacific Ocean. Meteorologists call it “explosive cyclogenesis”. According to the local weather office, this has been one of the most extraordinary winter seasons in a long time and Tuesday just made it even more special.

Strong winds blew over trees, knocked down power lines and broke windows in two buildings in San Francisco. I was too windy for ferry boats to operate properly and three barges got loose and hit a bridge.

An Amtrak train with 55 passengers also crashed into a fallen tree and came off the tracks near Porta Costa village in East Bay but luckily no one was hurt.

Five people unfortunately passed away due to the storm. In Portola Valley, a man driving a truck lost his life when a tree fell on it. While in Rossmoor, one person died and another got injured after a tree crashed into their car. Sadly, another man in Oakland died at night when a tree suddenly came down on the tent he was inside near Lake Merritt.

Two people sadly passed away at the Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital on Tuesday from injuries sustained during a storm. Further south in Santa Cruz County, winds blew as strong as an incredible 80 miles per hour. The winds then created huge foam that swirled around like a snowstorm!

On Wednesday, more than 80,000 customers had their electricity turned off. The cause of this was a storm that arrived on the first day of spring after we experienced an unusually cold winter. This storm was caused by a low pressure system coming from the Pacific and interacting with California’s 12th “atmospheric river” since December. There were also snow storms in February because of icy air when it was already very wet outside due to years-long drought.

The storms have caused a lot of flooding and dumped so much snow on the mountains that it got too heavy for some roofs. So, workers had to work hard clearing up the highways from avalanches.