Residents along Glencannon Drive in Pico Rivera were expecting rain.
But instead they got a tornado Thursday morning that downed trees and damaged several homes.
The tornado uprooted multiple trees along its path, sending some crashing into vehicles and homes. A brick wall collapsed in Edgar Reynoso’s backyard, but the rest of his home was relatively untouched by the strong winds.
“I heard like a big old bomb,” he said.
When he looked outside his window around 3:15 a.m., he saw lightning strike across the sky. Then he heard the winds gusting through his street.
“It’s my first tornado,” he said looking at his collapsed wall. “It’s my first time living through it and it was … it was pretty scary.”
California
A major storm continued to wallop much of Southern California on Thursday morning, bringing evacuation warnings, fears of mudslides and heavy mountain snow.
The National Weather Service confirmed a tornado touched down in Pico Rivera early Thursday with wind gusts up to 85 mph. The tornado formed around 3:15 a.m. and traveled roughly a mile.
Meteorologist Ariel Cohen with the National Weather Service walked the path of the tornado.
The tornado measured as an EF0, the lowest rating on a scale of 0 to 5 and measured about 80 yards wide. The tornado is on the upper end of the lowest rating of the EF scale, according to Cohen.
The damage pattern of the tornado is consistent with “a small, weak, brief tornado,” Cohen said.
“While brief, it was still damaging,” Cohen said.
Cuba Garcia woke up because he thought somebody was hitting the side of his home. But when he looked at his home’s security camera, he realized that a strong wind had yanked out a metal canopy in his front yard and flipped it onto his roof.
“He was stuttering, trying to explain to me what happened,” his mother, Dalia Garcia, said.
“It was unlike anything I had ever seen before,” Cuba Garcia said. The home was relatively unscathed, but several tarps and canopies were blown into the family’s backyard.
Several hours later, Dalia Garcia walked down the street to ask a crew of city workers if they could help her remove the canopy from her roof.
A worker explained that they couldn’t help, because it was a piece of her own property that flew onto the roof.
Cuba Garcia said he would probably have to recruit some friends to climb up on the roof with him and break apart the structure, which now resembled an upside down turtle.
“Earthquakes we can go through in our daily lives and be fine, but a tornado … tornadoes are just something totally different,” he said.
A large branch fell on top of Jesus Velazquez’s bright orange 1972 El Camino. City workers helped push his car out of the way as they trimmed the pine tree that damaged it.
Velazquez wants the tree gone.
“I’m just glad that we’re safe, but I have to go complain to City Hall about this,” he said.
Carlos Aguilar’s dog woke him up when the wind was howling outside. He heard a loud thump and looked out his window to find a 75-foot pine tree had crashed into his yard, narrowly missing his front door.
His 2018 Hyundai Elantra was not so lucky and was stuck under the tree for hours Thursday morning.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Aguilar said.
Steve Carmona, Pico Rivera city manager, said there were no injuries reported in the city and the majority of the property damage was focused on Glencannon Drive.
“There’s a lot of water saturation and we’re definitely going throughout the area and identifying any trees that may be at risk and removing them,” Carmona said.
Andre Garcia watched as city crews cleared downed trees from outside his home on Glencannon Drive.
“I pretty much heard loud noises, like it was a train passing by and then there was lightning,” he said. “Honestly, the damage was pretty crazy considering it was a low-grade tornado.”
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Nathan Solis reports on breaking news with the Fast Break team at the Los Angeles Times.
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