Skip to footer

McMinnville tornado: Weather Service confirms Oregon tornado

McMinnville tornado: Nobody was hurt, but three commercial buildings, all of them used for storage, were damaged, McMinnvilleFire Chief Rich Leipfert said.

|
Marcus Larson/News-Register/AP
The front side of the Mac U Store building had it's roof torn off as the storm passed through on Thursday, in McMinnville, Ore. The National Weather Service dispatched a storm survey team to McMinnville Thursday to determine whether wind damage was caused by a tornado.
  • By Associated Press

| McMINNVILLE, Ore.

It was indeed a tornado that damaged several buildings Thursday in the community of McMinnville, the National Weather Service has confirmed.

Nobody was hurt, but three commercial buildings, all of them used for storage, were damaged, McMinnvilleFire Chief Rich Leipfert said. The porch roof on one nearby home also sustained minor damage, Leipfert said.

A two-person NWS storm survey team dispatched to the scene confirmed the damage was caused by atornado.

The tornado's estimated top winds in the most damaged area ranged from 86 to 90 miles per hour, Weather Service meteorologist Treena Hartley said late Thursday night. That puts it in the EF1 storm category.

Elsewhere it was defined by the damage found as an EF0. That class of storm has winds from 65-85 mph, Hartley said.

McMinnville is about 35 miles southwest of Portland.

"I was just across the way and I saw the whole roof roll up off of the building," Kelly McDonald, managing partner of a nearby development, told the Yamhill Valley News-Register. "I wish I'd had the presence of mind to take a picture. I was just trying to get everyone inside."

Sean Cahill got caught in a torrential hailstorm as he was driving. He didn't see any cloud, he said, but he did see building debris flying in circles about 100 feet in the air.

"It looked like a confused flock of birds," Cahill said.

Experts look at debris patterns to confirm whether a tornado is responsible for damage, meteorologist Miles Higa said. The survey team also reported some damaged trees near the buildings that were hit.

The McMinnville tornado hit at about 4:30 p.m., he said.

Funnel clouds reportedly were also seen Thursday afternoon in or near the communities of Hillsboro, Albany and Harrisburg, Higa said.

Tornadoes in Oregon are rare. The last notable twister struck Aumsville, east of Salem, in December 2010, according to a list on the National Weather Service website. The storm caused more than $1 million in damage to 50 homes and four businesses, but nobody was injured.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to McMinnville tornado: Weather Service confirms Oregon tornado
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Latest-News-Wires/2013/0614/McMinnville-tornado-Weather-Service-confirms-Oregon-tornado
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe