Los Angeles:
A tornado swept through a Southern California town on Wednesday, ripping roofs off buildings and tossing cars as the state’s ongoing winter weather drama grew even wilder.
A swirling mass of wind — the kind commonly seen in the Midwest — swept through the Los Angeles town of Montebello, smashing windows and driving residents to safety.
“I was driving… and I saw a tornado in front of me and had to back up,” a local entrepreneur told broadcaster KTLA.
“The tornado blew off the roof of the building. All the windows on the cars were shattered. Cars were smashed, it was just a mess.”
Footage showed what appeared to be roofing material circling above industrial buildings in the city, which is just a few miles (miles) from downtown Los Angeles.
Aerial photos in the aftermath showed holes in several roofs, pipes and installations twisted and broken, and cars appeared to be pushed out of their parking bays.
“I just saw cars lurching through the streets and it was just the craziest thing I’ve ever seen,” said the entrepreneur.
The National Weather Service said it was investigating the event, calling it “a weak tornado,” and another in Carpinteria, near Santa Barbara.
“A weak, narrow tornado touched down briefly in Carpinteria’s Sandpiper Village mobile home park on Tuesday night, March 21,” the NWS said.
“It damaged about 25 mobile homes and there was minor tree damage to the cemetery adjacent to the mobile home park.”
Tornadoes — violently rotating columns of air that hit the ground — are nature’s most violent storms, says the NWS.
They can take wind gusts of up to 300 miles per hour and can tear through a neighborhood in seconds.
Preliminary NWS estimates suggest these two events had wind speeds of up to 85 miles per hour.
Nevertheless, “this is a pretty significant tornado by (California) standards as it impacted a populated area, caused obvious damage and may have caused injuries,” meteorologist Daniel Swain said on Twitter.
‘Long distance’
The tornadoes came at the tail end of an intense storm that swept across California, knocking down trees and disabling hundreds of thousands of people as it dumped heavy rain and snow.
Large parts of the state remain on flood watch, with a large area of land in Tulare County under water.
More than 700 buildings were damaged, according to the Los Angeles Times, said Carrie Monteiro, spokeswoman for the Tulare County Emergency Operations Center.
Utilities will have to assess potential damage to water, waste and electrical systems before someone can get the green light to return home.
“We’ve got a long way to go here in Tulare County,” she said.
In recent months, the state has been hit by a dozen atmospheric rivers — ribbons of moisture seeping in from the Pacific Ocean.
They’ve dumped trillions of gallons (liters) of water — rain and snow — into a part of the country suffering from a decades-long historic drought.
Water managers say that while regional reservoirs now look much healthier than in recent years, the situation could turn quickly if next winter is as dry as the last.
Scientists say human-induced climate change is exacerbating extreme weather events, making dry spells drier and wet spells much wetter.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by DailyExpertNews staff and is being published from a syndicated feed.)