‘IT WAS INSANE’
Storm tears through Pasadena neighborhood, injures children’s party attendees
Pasadena resident Dawn Ruploff thought she saw a tornado Sunday evening.
“It wasn’t a storm, it was a tornado. It ping ponged across the street from me,” Ruploff said. “I watched it and took cover in my house.”
The winds even blew open the front door of her house and broke a window, as well as causing a tree to fall down in her pool.
“It was a big swirling thing that ripped down all the wires. It was insane,” she said. “The house was shaking and sounded like a train.”
When the storm cleared, her front yard and others were full of tree debris, which she and her neighbors were picking up Monday afternoon.
The storm that tore through her neighborhood in Lake Shore shortly after 5 p.m., also caused a tree to fall onto a garage where more than 20 people were seeking shelter during a child’s birthday party. Emergency responders transported 21 people to area hospitals from the incident.
On Monday, the National Weather Service said the storm was a microburst, not a tornado. Commonly described as a
severe weather storm that causes damage, microbursts occur when air sinks during thunderstorms of a certain size.
National Weather Service meteorologist Ray Martin compared a microburst to when hot water is boiling and when the water is lifting and falling from the heat at the bottom of the pot.
“This was a typical microburst a little stronger than your average,” he said. “It was a very unstable atmosphere (Sunday), there was a lot of humidity and heat. Which is conducive to strong thunderstorms.”
During summer, the National Weather Service calls these “pulse thunderstorms” because they pop up based on small atmospheric fluctuations.
A little over a week ago, there was a similar weather event in an Annapolis area neighborhood that damaged 10 to 12 homes.
Of the 21 people who were transported to the hospital after the tree fell on the 30 foot by 30 foot garage, 19 were adults and two were children, said Capt. Russ Davies, spokesman with the Anne Arundel County Fire Department. One adult had critical but not believed to be life threatening injuries, six patients had serious but not life threatening injuries and another 14 had minor injuries.
They were transported to Baltimore Washington Medical Center, Shock Trauma Center in Baltimore, Johns Hopkins and Johns Hopkins Bayview.
There were 74 responding firefighters
“It was a big swirling thing that ripped down all the wires. It was insane. The house was shaking and sounded like a train.”
— Pasadena resident Dawn Ruploff
from Anne Arundel County Fire Department as well as Howard County Department of Fire and Rescue Services, Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport (BWI) Fire & Rescue Department, and Maryland State Police Aviation Command.
Ruploff’s brother is a firefighter and helped remove people from the garage where the tree fell and said she was amazed they got everyone out alive.
“It was very disheartening to see all the children upset,” she said.
Neighbor John Ferdock, who lives two doors down from where the tree fell on the garage, also had a tree fall on his roof. Ferdock had two trees removed from his backyard Monday afternoon.
Ferdock was watching the 2020 Rocket Mortgage Classic golf tournament on TV when the storm started to come through.
“The rain got really hard then it turned horizontally like a wind shear and that’s when I heard the thump on the roof,” Ferdock said. “All I saw was straight wind and rain horizontal. I didn’t see a funnel cloud. It was over in like a minute.”