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Amateur video captures the arrival of a rare tornado in South Los Angeles which damages an apartment complex and two houses. Rough cut (no reporter narration)
Video provided by Reuters Newslook
Traffic moves around flooding in the right lane of main Street in Hesperia, Calif., on Dec. 12.(Photo: James Quigg, AP)
A small tornado touched down in Los Angeles on Friday, ripping off parts of rooftops and downing trees in the southern part of the city.
The National Weather Service confirmed an EF-0 tornado touched down Friday morning. "It got a lot of people excited, but thank goodness nobody was hurt," said Stuart Seto of the National Weather Service.
EF-0 twisters are the smallest type of tornadoes, with winds reaching 65 to 85 mph. EF refers to the Enhanced Fujita Scale of tornado intensity, which runs from EF-0 to EF-5. Most twisters that cause damage and deaths are EF-1 or higher.
The Los Angeles Times reported the tornado hit across a 10-block span, damaging at least five homes. Caught in the middle of the storm, Deborah LaVergne, 56, was preparing turkey sandwiches in a South Los Angeles kitchen when she looked out a window to see a trash can swirling 30 feet in the air.
"The whole building was shaking," LaVergne told the Times. "It sounded like a freight train."
The storm that produced the tornado was part of a ferocious system that pounded Southern California on Friday with heavy rain and hurricane-force winds, causing flash floods and mudslides that closed roads, buried homes in mud and left tens of thousands without power.
The storm, dubbed the "Pineapple Express," is one of the strongest to hit the West Coast in years.
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Jamie Mena captured video of the twister as it spun through the neighborhood. "I've never seen anything like that, it was crazy," Mena told ABC7 Los Angeles. "I am shaken up."
Some witnesses said they thought they were in the middle of an earthquake when the twister hit.
"All of the sudden I heard something rumbling, and one of my neighbors was here and she said, 'The trash can is flying, we're having a tornado,'" Marleen Benefield told NBC Los Angeles. "I said, 'No, not in Cali, we don't do that!"
Contributing: The Associated Press
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