Weather expert: EF-1 tornado hit Milledgeville
Mar. 30—The tornado that struck portions of Milledgeville on Sunday morning has been classified as an EF-1 tornado that packed speeds of up to 105 mph.
That's the official word from Keith Stellman, meteorologist-in-charge of the National Weather Service in Peachtree City.
Stellman looked at the damages that the tornado caused in areas of the city before he concluded that it was an EF-1 tornado.
He explained the process to reporters following a press conference by Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp in front of the Baldwin County Emergency Management Agency on Barrows Ferry Road on Tuesday morning.
"When we do an assessment, a lot of times we'll start with the worst of the damage because the tornado rating is based on the worst of the damage," Stellman said. "It's all based on the windspeed and what it does to structures. Trees typically can fall between 75 and 90 mph. But when you start getting into structures, then you start looking at the structural integrity of something."
Many engineers have studied what it takes to take a roof off and what it takes to peel off roofing shingles.
Stellman said you begin assessing all of those things to come up with an overall rating.
He reiterated that the rating of the tornado was based on the combination of the tree damages, as well as the rooftops and structural damages to residences and businesses, "and the windspeed it takes to cause such damages."
He explained that meteorologists actually look at the damages and then work backward to come up with a windspeed.
The weather expert said he still had not yet assessed what the actual path of the tornado was in Milledgeville and in the area of Black Springs Road, which is situated in Baldwin County.
"I'm actually still assessing that," Stellman said. "I've still go east of here to get the total link of the track, but it was on the ground for quite a while it looks like."
He estimated the tornado stayed on the ground for at least five to 10 minutes, based on radar.
When asked what could have made the tornado worse than it was, Stellman immediately responded.
"Loss of life, for sure," he said. "That's always a tragic thing when you come into something like this. It doesn't take a lot. You see a fallen tree and we see a lot of loss of lives from just fallen trees, which come down at lower wind speeds. Thankfully that did not happen here."
He attributed such an outcome to residents taking heed to the tornado warning that was issued by the National Weather Service (NWS).
The extensive band of severe thunderstorms that roared across Milledgeville and Baldwin County, and surrounding counties in central Georgia originated in Mississippi, where 23 people lost their lives last Saturday.
Stellman said Mississippi certainly took the brunt of it all.
"Thankfully, we were on the tail-end of it, even though we still took a pretty good punch on Sunday," he said.
Stellman also talked about why the severe thunderstorms — two of which triggered tornados in Troup County before the one that hit Milledgeville and Baldwin County — lingered as long as they did.
"It was a very unusual setup that happened both Sunday morning into Sunday night and Monday," Stellman said. "We had a stalled boundary. It was sort of a battle between the high and the low. Basically, there was a big high over Florida and a low sitting over the Mid-West."
As such, it created a battle of sorts and Georgia happened to have been caught in between, he said.
"It was basically a funneling of all of that moisture along that battle zone," Stellman said. "We were in a battle zone between the two."
On Sunday night, he said the National Weather Prediction Center put out a high-risk warning for catastrophic flooding, meaning the perimeters were in place for such an event.
"It's very rare that they put that out," Stellman said. "And certainly we saw that with the big flooding."
In Milledgeville and Baldwin County, rain estimates ranged from seven to eight inches, according to Colin Duke, assistant director of the Baldwin County Emergency Management-Homeland Security Agency.
