NWS gives Charlie tornado a preliminary EF1 rating

CHARLIE, TX (TNN) - The National Weather Service in Norman has given Tuesday’s tornado a preliminary rating on the Enhanced Fujita scale as an EF 1.

“Most of what is here is a lot of tree damage,” said Brandon Lee, a Charlie resident.

Lee and a few others spent their morning helping the Jetton’s family clean up after a damaging tornado ripped through northern Clay County Tuesday afternoon.

“I was at home. We had just received the alert and the tornado was already on top of us.” said Lee “We had no time to react so we took shelter in the house when we normally go to a cellar in our neighbors house.”

Rick Smith, a warning coordination meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Norman was driving around Charlie Thursday morning taking note of all the damage that was left behind.

“To determine how many tornadoes there were, how strong the winds might have been in those tornadoes, how long they might have been on the ground, and how wide they were,” said Smith.

Part of his plan on was to stop by Wendy Coker’s home. The Petrolia CISD teacher we told you about on Wednesday who lost her home.

“This [her house] is probably like a level four on a scale from 0 to 10 on the levels of damage that we look at because the roof is mostly gone but the structure itself is pretty much still there,” said Smith.

After examining all the damage, Smith said the next step to help figure out the intensity of the tornado is to find out where the tornado started and ended.

“Get some estimates on how wide it was just by looking at the damage along with different points of the track and then assigning an intensity rating,” said Smith.

Smith said it’s important to know that they will give one rating to the entire tornado path.

Therefore, the EF1 preliminary rating we got on Thursday doesn’t mean that every spot of the tornado’s path had EF1 damage. It just means that was the highest damage they found.

The rating EF1 means winds were approximately between 86 and 110 mph with moderate damage.

Copyright 2019 Texoma News Network. All rights reserved.