LARGO, Fla. (WFLA) — The National Weather Service said an EF-1 tornado touched down in Largo Wednesday.
“I have no idea whose house is blue and white,” Susan Haas said, pointing to a roof lying in her backyard.
Haas was in her home in the Bay Ranch Mobile Home Park Wednesday when, suddenly, her dog, Ollie, began violently shaking.
She knew something was wrong.
“I looked outside, [and] I saw debris flying through the air,” Haas said. “My daughter kind of freaked out.”
“I grabbed her and covered her with my body,” she continued. “Everything kept flying by, there was nothing we could do, it was just too late.”
The national weather service said, it was an EF-1 tornado with 90 mph wind speeds.
Though many Largo residents felt the tornado lingered longer, Science and Operations Officer Matt Anderson noted that it was actually on the ground for six to seven minutes, covering slightly over two miles.
“Typically, these boundary collisions aren’t significant, and not much develops,” he stated. “However, on this occasion, there seemed to be some additional low-level rotation in the atmosphere that the boundaries managed to stretch, forming a tornado.”
Haas and many of her neighbors asked the same question Thursday: Why weren’t they alerted?
“Never got it on the phone,” Haas said. “It was just that fast.”
Anderson agreed, saying by the time they saw it on radar, it was too late.
“The radar didn’t detect it because the circulation was extremely shallow,” he mentioned. “We identified the rotation using the radar stationed at MacDill Airforce Base, but by the time we observed the circulation, it had already dissipated.”
