Landspouts twirl near Milton-Freewater

Published 4:00 pm Thursday, March 7, 2024

MILTON-FREEWATER — Tonya Brewer of Helix was startled Tuesday, March 5, when she spotted a series of tornado-shaped landspouts near Milton-Freewater.

“This started in the morning when we were home and I was looking at the weather app and it said possible tornadoes,” Brewer said. “I thought, ‘No way. We don’t have tornadoes here.’”

Brewer said she had traveled on Highway 11 as far as Athena when she saw clouds that “looked a bit crazy.”

About 2 miles south of Milton-Freewater she said she saw what looked like a tornado on the east side of the highway.

“By that time we came down this dip and popped up the other side where we could see good, and there were two on the west side and the one on the east had disappeared,” she said.

Brewer said she stopped the car about 11:23 a.m. to get pictures with her boyfriend.

“Nobody else around was stopping so I don’t know if anyone else even noticed it,” she said.

Brewer said she could see debris the landspout carried aloft from the fieldl.

Not a dust devil“I’ve grown up seeing dust devils all the time, but this was nothing like that,” Brewer said. “I don’t know how tall it was. I would say at least 100 feet, 250 feet maybe. It was down a canyon and then up the other side of the hill from where I was standing.”

Brewer got to be instantly famous after posting her photos and videos on Facebook.

“Seven or eight news channels reached out to me and I’ve had friends say, ‘Oh, we just saw your picture on the news,’” Brewer said. “I posted the pictures at probably noon and then I even did a Zoom meeting with one news guy from KTVU news at about 4:30 p.m. while we were working out and he goes, ‘Can I do a Zoom meeting with you right now or an interview?’ and I said, ‘Yeah, that’s fine. I can take a break from working out, I guess.’”

Brewer also shared her news with the U.S. Weather Service office in Pendleton, speaking with meteorologist Colby Goatley, who said the phenomenon was indeed a landspout.

“They obviously share similar resemblance to any sort of tornado you would know,” Goatley said, “but they are generally very weak. Sometimes they’re not even visible because of how weak they are.”

He said the spouts generally do not cause damage.

“They may blow up gusts from the ground, and they look threatening, especially in parts of the country where a tornado is a very rare occurrence,” Goatley said.

Tornadoes are a distant cousinGoatley said at the surface, landspouts do share similarities with the tornado being that they come from a cloud structure or wind.

“Typically they’re not associated with stronger thunderstorms,” he said, “whereas a tornado is obviously associated with a strong thunderstorm that’s somewhere close to being severe.”

Even though a landspout is generally a tepid weather event, Goatley said the Weather Service was happy to receive and process Brewer’s report and it absolutely takes interest in such things.

“We did issue a storm report on what we were informed about,” Goatley said, “but generally we won’t be issuing any sort of warning, unless there were some stronger winds near the surface that caused some sort of issue.”

Even though Goatley described landspouts as 99-pound weaklings, he cautioned it’s a good idea to keep your distance.

“I definitely wouldn’t suggest driving into them or close to them,” Goatley said. “They are still a rotating column of air, and those can be hazardous in and of itself because the directions of the wind around and within can be unpredictable, and on rare occasions they can be on the stronger side. I would advise staying away from them.”

Goatley said the colleague he was working with March 4 said to him, “’We’ve got the ingredients that could form these sorts of landspouts.’ Potentially, they’re harder to diagnose, but sure enough, he was right.”