Tornado touches down in North Brookfield, damaging trees

Amid critical thunderstorms Sunday, a weak twister briefly touched down in North Brookfield within the late morning, inflicting no accidents or property injury.

The Nationwide Climate Service confirmed {that a} 0 EF-level twister, the least intense twister stage doable, traveled about two miles throughout the central Massachusetts city between 10:56 a.m. and 10:59 a.m. It had an estimated max wind pace of 80 mph and was about 250 yards broad.

The twister touched down a little bit east of the North Brookfield Waste Water Middle and traveled northeast, ending barely east of the intersection of Ryan and Hillsville Highway, the service mentioned.

The twister solely broken bushes, the service mentioned, with probably the most concentrated injury occurring on Ryan Highway simply north of the intersection with Ward Road.

“There have been a number of eyewitnesses to the twister, though none of them noticed an precise funnel,” the service wrote in a report. “One witness was in an auto physique store and reported robust winds making the storage door bow inward. One other eyewitness, the Hearth Chief for North Brookfield, noticed particles lofted within the air.”

The North Brookfield Emergency Administration Company indicated that Sunday’s storms induced energy outages and a number of downed bushes.

It’s not unusual for Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island to expertise just a few small tornados annually, NWS meteorologist Alan Dunham mentioned. Normally you want a big thunderstorm, however the storms at this time weren’t as critical, which is why the twister was so small, he mentioned.

Many cities in west Essex and northern Worcester Counties had been underneath a twister watch Sunday, as far west as Townsend and as far east as Tewksbury. However no different cities appear to have skilled a twister.