Tornado touches down without warning from N.W.S.
"There was no alert. we didn't know anything."
MONROE COUNTY, Miss. (WCBI) – While many people were able to sleep in this holiday morning, some in Monroe County woke up early to the sound of rolling thunder.
One resident woke up to glass shattering in her bedroom window…from the winds of a suspected tornado in her backyard.
Despite clear indication that a tornado was here on the ground, on Pickle Road, the National Weather Service did not issue a tornado warning. And people who live here want to know why.
“There was no alert. we didn’t know anything. There was nothing going off. I didn’t understand that.”
Ms. Betty was fast asleep when she heard a bedroom window break from intense wind.
“Luckily, the glass that came in, didn’t come through on my
“I went running to the tub actually, me and my little dog. I didn’t know when it would be over or what was going on.”
It was too late.
Our Chief Meteorologist Issac Williams spotted the tornadic debris signature around 4:40 am.
“…we might have just had a tornado touchdown east of Lackey…”
A tornado touched down without warning from the National Weather Service.
“This is our debris detector. What I have circled here is a relative minimum in the correlation coefficient. Now we have to line that up with velocity and reflectivity as well but all of these products match and seem to suggest that there might have been a brief tornado.”
Issac asked the National Weather Service up in Memphis if they believed that it was a tornado debris signature.
“They did say they did not believe that it was a tornado but they are going to review the radar data and potentially make a different determination at a later date.”
Ms. Betty’s family lives a quarter mile down the road.
They all pitched in to start clearing fallen trees before the next round of severe weather struck.
You can see this debris pile is taller than I am, and I’m five foot five. Surprisingly, Ms. Betty’s yard was the only area on Pickle Road that was impacted as severely as it was.
Ms. Betty and her dog walked away unscathed.
