Hot Gulf Coast air spawns 6 twisters in Mid-Atlantic
BOSTON — Six tornadoes tore through the Mid-Atlantic states on Friday, toppling trees, damaging homes and wrecking barns, and setting a new February record for the destructive storms in Maryland.
Unusually warm and humid air pushing up from the Gulf of Mexico, extreme winds in the jet stream, and a strengthening storm passing through the region provided the ingredients for the historic outbreak, Dan Hofmann, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Sterling, Va., wrote in a report.
“In just two hours, five of the confirmed tornadoes struck the state of Maryland, unprecedented for the month of February,” Hofmann wrote. “Prior to this outbreak, only four tornadoes had been reported in the state of Maryland in the month of February since 1950.”
The state’s previous February tornadoes were all individual strikes hitting in different years, with three of them occurring since 2014. The fourth hit in 1966. There was only one reported injury from those incidents, when straight-line winds tore the roof off a small business in southern Maryland.
High winds on Friday carved a path of destruction across seven states from Alabama to New Jersey, the U.S. Storm Prediction Center said. Widespread power outages were also reported.
In the Pacific Northwest, waters covering roads in flood-hit northeastern Oregon were starting to recede Saturday, allowing residents who spent the night in shelters to return and assess the damage, a Red Cross official said.
Some residents in the foothills of the Blue Mountains in northeast Oregon had to be airlifted by from their flooded homes by helicopter and even were taken out in a front-end loader as rain and melting snow caused rivers to crest their banks. Some lower-income neighborhoods in Pendleton, a town of 16,000, were hit, damaging mobile homes, authorities said.
“They’ll be able to go to their homes and see what is left, if anything, and see what the damage is,” Nadine McCrindle, the Red Cross executive director for central and eastern Oregon, said. The rain had stopped on Saturday morning, but more was forecast before sunny weather comes Sunday. The National Weather Service said flood warnings remained in effect.
The Umatilla River crested just before 10 p.m. Thursday at more than 19 feet, nearly four times the average height for that date. Rivers all around the region overran their banks
Oregon Gov. Kate Brown declared a state of emergency in Umatilla, Wallowa and Union counties late Friday, allowing mobilization of the National Guard.
Farther north, thousands of Puget Sound Energy customers lost power as a cold front moved through western Washington on Friday evening.