By Stephen Smoot
The lightning crashed, the wind howled, the rains pounded the earth. Trees fell, water flowed over roads and into basements.
But the jury remains out on whether or not a tornado touched down in the storms of Monday June 9.
Two areas were suspected of seeing tornados touch ground during that storm, along US 220 with a mile of the Hardy and Hampshire County line and also on Church Road not far away.
Of the US 220 site Tammy Gilhuys, Deputy Director of the Hardy County Office of Emergency Management, stated “that was unfounded.” Despite the fact that the storm drove a vehicle off of US 220, requiring response from fire and ambulance units, the pattern of debris was not consistent with that of a tornado.
Gilhuys submitted the Church Road site to the National Weather Service for confirmation, but as of Friday had not received word.
The National Weather Service follows a specific protocol to separate tornados from other types of damaging storm winds, such as microbursts.
Microbursts, an intense downdraft from a powerful thunderstorm, often get confused with tornadoes because both cause significant damage. Place names, such as Fallen Timbers in Ohio or Flatwoods in West Virginia, mark spots where microbursts produced devastation even in virgin timber forests.
Trees appear flattened out, sometimes in a fan-shaped configuration.
Tornadoes produce what the NWS calls “a chaotic appearance with larger uprooted trees often crossing each other.”
If confirmed, that would be the first official confirmation of a tornado touchdown in Hardy County. One of the closest times lay in the June 1944 passage over Moorefield of a storm that spawned tornadoes that devastated Shinnston in Harrison County and other communities to the east. While the storm brought no tornadoes to Hardy, mail delivered to Shinnston addresses stayed high in the clouds and landed on the Hardy County seat.
Guilhuys shared that she personally went door to door to gather information on the storm’s effects on residents. “The only thing I can confirm,” she shared “is that six houses took in water and one had foundation damage.”
“When it happened,” Gilhuys continued, “people sent in videos and pictures. So many were surrounded by water,” but didn’t get damaged. Additionally “none wanted evacuated” and no calls requesting assistance came in. She discovered houses with flood damage to basements by going door to door, finding households engaged in cleaning out the muck that storm water can bring in.
“People are so accustomed to it,” she remarked, going on to say that “They’ve been through it. People know how to deal with it and they do.”
The most recent round of storms took West Virginia fully out of drought or “abnormally dry” conditions. Just last week, large parts of the Potomac Highlands remained in abnormally dry or moderate drought status, according to the federal website drought.gov.
Streamflow monitor stations report normal flow in the South Branch River at Moorefield. Farther upstream at Franklin, however, the flow is above normal, but is normal on the South Fork River at Brandywine. Flow is also at normal levels on the North Fork and South Branch in Grant County.
