Two tornadoes touch down in County
Power outage affects about 4,800 electric customers
RED BLUFF » The National Weather Service confirmed that two tornadoes touched down Monday near Corning and Vina.
Almost 5,000 Tehama County residents and businesses lost power during Monday’s large storm as the National Weather Service issued a tornado warning in the area.
The original tornado warning was issued for the area surrounding Vina and due east of Corning, said Meteorologist Sierra Littlefield. It was then extended until 4 p.m. including Butte County as well.
The first tornado hit the ground near Corning around 1:34 p.m., where damage, including downed trees and power lines, were found in west Corning. Reports of additional structure damage are under investigation, including some reports from Cal Fire-Butte County, Sacramento meteorologist Eric Kurths said.
A second tornado was spotted touching down near Vina, south of Los Molinos, around 2:40 p.m.
Kurths said so far there are no reports of damage caused by this tornado.
Kurths said at the time both tornadoes originated, wind and thunderstorm advisories were in place. A monitoring station in Corning observed gusts of 31 miles per hour around noon and 37 miles per hour at 3 p.m.
The strong line of local thunderstorms may have combined with a “high sheer” environment which means it helped produce rotational wind energy, he said. The tornado wind speeds may have been in the 65- 80 miles per hour wind speed range, which Kurths said are typical of tornadoes seen in the north state, but more data is currently being collected.
A tweet was issued by the National Weather Service and a radio broadcast was put forth to the public of Tehama County. The tweet showed a map of the potential threat area.
As of 3 p.m. Monday, Littlefield said the tornado conditions in the aforementioned area were winding down. No calls had come in reporting a tornado.
Due to the large storm, about 4,801 PG&E customers lost power, said the company’s spokesman for the area Paul Moreno.
“We have a large outage in Corning which began at 1:34 p.m. and was caused by lightning striking substation equipment at our Corning substation on Houghton Avenue,” Moreno said.
Crews were sent by PG&E to fix the issue and isolate damaged equipment so that customers could get their power back.
According to Moreno, there was another outage during the early morning hours Monday.
“We also had an outage in Richfield that started at 1:09 a.m. and impacted 367 customers, with all but one restored at 3:45 a.m. and the last customers back on at 10:20 a.m.,” Moreno said.
The cause of this outage was a broken insulator.
Tehama County Public Works closed Hall Road around 4 p.m. Monday due to a wet crossing between Gyle and Tehama.