National Weather Service Visits The Tri-State

The National Weather Service paid the tri-state a visit this morning to determine the intensity of last nights storm. Yesterdays weather was the perfect recipe for a January tornado. Temperatures were in the 50s combined with a strong cold front. The National Weather Service says the result was the E-F-2 twister. Rick Shanklin and the National Weather Service was up bright and early to determine whether the damage from Tuesday nights storm in Posey and Gibson counties was in fact a tornado. The National Weather Service determined an E-F 2 tornado did touch down in Posey county. The tornado was six miles in length and its winds reached a powerful 125 miles per hour. After surveying the debris in Posey county, the National Weather Service headed to Fort Branch where the damage was just as bad. Stephanie coy and her husband live in Fort Branch and came home from a normal shopping trip to find their home in pieces. "It was disbelief, you never think it would happen to you. To see the garage was gone and the roof had a hole in it, it was shocking." Although the weather service says there was no tornado in Fort Branch, straight line winds reaching 80-to-90 miles per hour were strong enough to destroy near by homes. The Coys told us it will cost anywhere from 25 to 30 thousand dollars to fix their home, which was just built two years ago. The storm was a classic reminder of how dangerous thunderstorms can be, even in the winter months. To give you an idea of the size and strength of this tornado, lets compare it to the one that hit Eastbrook Mobile Home Park in November of 2005. That was an F-3 tornado with sustained winds of 200 miles an hour, this was a smaller twister with winds of only 125 miles an hour, which is still enough to cause a lot of damage.