The Tornado East Texas Never Saw Coming – And Why They May Not See The Next One

Lovelady, Texas, is the quintessential American small town – 600 residents and one traffic light, the kind that forever blinks yellow for passers-through on Highway 19, and red for cross traffic on the local farm-to-market road.

Sunday, April 13, 2014, was a muggy afternoon in this quiet Houston County burg, 95 miles north of the city of Houston. Occasionally a shower passed by. The town was near the southern lip of a “slight risk” severe weather outlook issued by the Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Okla., suggesting that hailstorms and strong wind gusts were possible sometime Sunday or Sunday night, with a 2 percent chance of a tornado within 25 miles of town.

But as the hours wore on, thunder and lightning seemed determined to stay away, and all tornado watches and warnings were for storms over 100 miles to the north. One boomer passed through the county around 3:15 p.m., but it was too far away for Lovelady residents to hear anything even over the quiet of the surrounding pastures.

Then, out of nowhere, chaos struck.

Sometime between 4:30 and 5 o’clock, a tornado spun up on the west side of town, within spitting distance of the town’s traffic light. In an instant, at least two large trees were pulled from the ground, smashing into the dining room of Toni Cowger’s mobile home. She had just left the dining table to peek outside at the wind-whipped commotion – and escaped with a cut leg.

At the same time, Esther Ramirez’s mobile home was shoved off its foundation and mangled by the twister. Ramirez, who is battling cancer, had left 45 minutes earlier to spend the evening with her son. She was unhurt.

Within two minutes, the tornado zipped three-quarters of a mile north to Lovelady High School, causing some cosmetic damage, and then disappeared.

Confusion and Clues

Information about the tornado in Lovelady was slow to reach the outside world.

For several hours, discussion percolated in the National Weather Service’s private chat room, limited to meteorologists, emergency managers and members of the media.

Skepticism reigned. Photographs and videos of damage – and even of a tornado – had surfaced on the internet, but radar didn’t show anything even remotely resembling a storm capable of unleashing such chaos. Furthermore, there were conflicting reports about the timing of the twister – reports normally resolved by matching damage areas to radar signatures.

Meteorologist Patrick Blood was on duty Sunday at the National Weather Service office in League City, Texas, near Houston. With conflicting reports from the scene and a lack of detailed information from the Houston County Sheriff’s Office, Blood had to take an educated guess at when the tornado may have occurred.
http://www.weather.com/news/tornado-central/east-texas-lovelady-tornado-radar-hole-20140416