Tornado alley it’s not, but a section of California was hit Saturday with a rare tornado that has been blamed for injuring five and flipping vehicles as a storm moved across the state.
A tornado in Scotts Valley, a small city about 6 miles north of Santa Cruz “threw multiple cars off the road,” the city police department said on Facebook, where it posted images of overturned vehicles.
Police Capt. Scott Garner said five people, most in vehicles that were tossed or moved by the tornado, suffered injuries, but none of them were major. Three were hospitalized with non-life-threatening injuries while two refused treatment at the scene, he said.
A National Weather Service damage survey determined an EF1 tornado touched down in Scotts Valley at 1:39 p.m. local time and had an estimated peak wind of 90 mph.
The tornado traveled about 30 yards, with the most severe damage on Mount Hermon Road, the city’s main street and retail district, the survey found.
Photos shared by the Scotts Valley Police Department showed cars strewn about on and around the road.
Officers responding to the scene were called to reports of a multi-vehicle collision, but were astonished to see instead the aftermath of a tornado, including bent utility poles and extensive property damage, Garner said.
“You can imagine officers responding finding telephone poles at angles,” he said. “They stumbled into that.”
California averages only about 11 tornadoes each year, with the northern Central Valley being the part of the state most likely to see one, according to the weather service.
Earlier Saturday, the weather service had issued a tornado warning for San Francisco shortly before 6 a.m., but it was canceled after no tornado organized in the area.
The warning was the first for San Francisco city and county at least since the inception of reliable weather records in 1950, said Nicole Sarment, a weather service meteorologist in the Bay Area.
