No, it wasn’t a tornado.
Even if Sunday night’s storm that mowed over trees and ripped away large portions of the roof at Hazel’s House of Hope acted like one at times.
“We call these kinds of storms ‘straight-line wind’ events,” said Myranda Fullerton, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Pittsburgh — because that’s what they are.
That what this one was.
Jim Smith, who directs MECCA 911, Monongalia County’s emergency dispatch center, said the first calls lit up the switchboard at 8:20 p.m. as the storm was making its inaugural rumblings.
It was done 20 minutes later, he said, leaving a matchstick selection of snapped trees along Smithtown Road — to go with lots of bare, exposed swatches on the roof of Hazel’s House of Hope, a center for outreach agencies on Scott Avenue.
The building, which was a Ramada Inn during its former architectural life, was particularly slammed.
At least 20,000 square feet of its roofing material was blown away, according to estimates by county officials, leaving exposed areas for water to gush through.
Wind speeds on the sidewalks and parking lot of the complex were estimated at 60-70 mph, Fullerton said. The roof, which rises 45 feet above those surfaces, had a decidedly different climate, however, the meteorologist reported.
Winds up top were roaring from 90 to 100 mph, she said, which was strong enough to send a 2,500-pound compressor cartwheeling 120 feet.
The NWS team knew it wasn’t a tornado because of the forward-leaning damage that gives the weather pattern its name, Fullerton said.
Trees are the indicator, she said.
In contrast, winds generated by tornadoes are always spinning.
Such churning, Fullerton said, twists tree trunks and yanks them from the ground, thus relieving them from their root systems — whereas trees caught in a straight-line windstorm are simply snapped in two.
On Monday, the MECCA director counted 13 trees that were felled in the Smithtown area and along W.Va. 73 from the night before, as the storm raged.
What was bad, he said, could have been terribly bad.
“No one was hurt or worse,” he said. “A lot of people worked together to help. That’s what we do.”
On Monday afternoon, he was marveling at the meteorological ferocity of it all.
“It’s pretty amazing how a storm could have hundred-mile-an-hour winds and not be a tornado.”
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