(CNN) At least one person was injured after a rare tornado touched down in a town southeast of Los Angeles on Wednesday, local officials said.
The National Weather Service confirmed that the tornado “briefly hit” an industrial park and warehouse district in the city of Montebello and rated the tornado an EF-1 with estimated peak winds of 110 mph – – the strongest tornado to hit the Los Angeles area since 1983.
The “intense microcell” damaged at least 17 buildings, 11 so badly that the fire department deemed it too dangerous to use, according to Michael Chee, a city public information officer.
“There’s flying debris and everything!!!!” Tweet a person who shared a video of the typhoon. The video zooms in on a mass of dark gray clouds that consume the sky and descend towards the earth.
The reported injuries are considered minor, Chee said in a press conference.
The tornado collapsed a roof on a building, snapped a power pole, knocked an HVAC unit off the top of a building, shattered skylights, damaged cars and uprooted a healthy tree. of pine with a foot-wide trunk, the weather service reported after assessing storm damage in Montebello Wednesday.
At least one commercial building was damaged in Wednesday’s storm.
Tornadoes are rare in California, with an average of less than 10 per year, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Most of the state’s tornadoes are small and short-lived.
These are often called landspouts (similar to a waterspout, but above ground). These are different from the more traditional tornadoes that form from rotating storms, such as are common in the Central Plains and the Southeast. While landspouts can cause damage, it is usually not extensive or severe.
On Tuesday night, a weak tornado touched down at a mobile home park in Carpinteria – a coastal city northwest of Los Angeles, the weather service confirmed on Wednesday. The service rated it an EF-0, with winds of 75 mph.
The tornado damaged 25 mobile home units in the Sandpiper Village mobile home park and caused minor tree damage in a nearby cemetery.
Additional video of the storm in Montebello shows a swirling cloud of black debris as the roof of a nearby building is blown off. Cars can be seen with damage and broken windows.
“The roof came from this building,” said a witness as he recorded a parking lot full of wrecked cars.
“These are the things you see in Ohio, Arkansas … Not Montebello,” another witness was heard saying.
Wednesday’s severe weather comes as California has been battered in recent months by at least 12 atmospheric rivers that have brought damaging flooding and hurricane-force winds. An atmospheric river is like a fire hose that carries saturated air from the tropics to higher latitudes, dumping incessant rain or snow.
At least five people were killed by the storm in the San Francisco Bay Area as strong winds lashed the cities on Tuesday, downing trees and power lines. The city of San Francisco said its 911 call center had four times the normal number of calls during the storm’s peak, resulting in more than 700 downed trees and branches and reports of glass and debris falling from high towers.
CNN Meteorologist Robert Shackelford and CNN’s Jillian Sykes contributed to this report.
