FLYING cars, snapped electricity poles, embedded debris, twisted metal, roofs lifted off homes, 160mph winds and a noise like machine-gun fire.
Such a scenario was something people in Jersey would only ever have experienced while watching disaster films, but it became a real-life horror movie as a devastating tornado ripped across the south-east corner of the Island last autumn.
Further details about the tornado have now been spelled out in a new report produced by the Tornado and Storm Research Organisation.
The final report from the organisation follows a two-day visit by author Sarah Horton on the weekend following the tornado, which made landfall in St Clement shortly before midnight on 1 November last year, wreaking havoc as it made its way across several parishes.
TORRO keeps records of tornadoes for the UK, Republic of Ireland, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man.
The Jersey report tracks the impact of the tornado across its five-mile journey prior to exiting the Island at Fliquet, leaving a swathe of destruction that put three Islanders in hospital. The damage rendered dozens of homes uninhabitable.
According to the document, the width of the tornado was 550 metres as it made landfall, reducing to 125 metres at its most narrow point, and measured 400 metres wide as it left the Island.
Initial reports that the tornado was the most severe to hit the British Isles in almost 70 years have been confirmed by the report, with three of the 14 incidents outlined being assigned a “T6” rating by TORRO.
The TORRO International Intensity Scale categorises a T6 tornado as featuring winds of between 161 and 186mph. Nine of the 14 incidents were graded T5 (137-160mph), with the other two classed as being on the T5/T6 threshold.
Occurring less than a decade after the end of the Second World War, the tornado in Gunnersbury, West London, on 7 December 1954, was likened by residents to the wartime Blitz, and subsequently categorised as T7.
The Jersey report notes that “everyone who was spoken to expressed both shock and astonishment that only three people were taken to hospital”.
It continues: “Residents described it as very frightening event; one person said that the rain was ‘like turning on a hundred fire hoses’.
“Many people described ‘feeling pressure in their ears’ and that they could feel their homes shaking.
“The sound was described in various ways by different people: ‘three great thumps, one after the other’; ‘like machine-gun fire’; ‘it was like a roar’.
Some of the individual incidents would be barely believable in an account that wasn’t as strongly evidence-based as the TORRO report. These include:
– Wooden beams from the Geoff Reed Table Tennis Centre at FB Fields being blown off the building and carried 150 metres across the playing fields. The beams were over five metres long, weighing around 100 kilogrammes (16 stone).
– At a property at Le Boulivot in Grouville, debris was blown off a roof and embedded into wall-hanging tiles, while a car weighing 1,540kg was blown 25 metres, leaving no drag marks on the wet turf and apparently clearing low shrubs of 50cm in height.
– At Route de la Hougue Bie, a large branch being embedded in the roof of a house which also lost its ceiling. The man living in the property is said to have slept through the event.
– The Beuvelande campsite saw a number of demolished caravans, with the remnants from some being blown up to 80 metres, while electricity poles were snapped and one pole was pulled out of the ground.
– The tornado’s parting shot at Fliquet saw no reduction in its intensity, as debris from cottages in the coastal hamlet was scattered – this included patio doors which penetrated a garage door 60 metres away and severely dented the car inside.
The report acknowledges the response from Islanders, stating: “People in Jersey came together to support those affected in the community. A group was set up on social media to offer support in many different ways and a fund was set up by the government.”
The full 41-page report is available at torro.org.uk/research/event.
