PEORIA, Ill. — The National Weather Service on Wednesday was weeding through trained spotter reports from Tuesday’s storm to determine whether or not there was any official tornadic activity.
The band of thunderstorms was severe enough to cause the NWS to issue a tornado warning shortly before 3 P.M. for much of Central Illinois.
Preliminarily speaking, however, there did not appear to be any actual tornadoes.
“Considering how fast they [the storm cells] were moving, if one did touch down, it would have been brief, and if you weren’t watching it, you might have missed it,” said Senior Meteorologist James Auten of the Lincoln NWS office.
“It definitely was a quasi linear convective system, and definitely you could get spots that look like there might have been some rotation with it, but even though there were a couple reports of wall clouds, we didn’t have any funnel cloud reports.”
One of those wall cloud reports came around 3:50 from an eyewitness in the Metamora area.
The most highly measured wind speed was 63 miles per hour, from a trained spotter just northwest of East Peoria. An estimated gust of 70 MPH came from Washburn.
The most significant damage, he said, was in Elmwood, where an apartment building had its roof blown off.
Additionally, the Peoria County Sheriff’s Office reported Midwest Fiber on N. Old Galena Rd. sustained roof damage.
Auten said all reported structural damage appeared to be induced by winds, and not by tornadoes, though the line is blurred.
“With storms moving this quickly, it’s really difficult to tell the difference between straight line winds of 60 to 65 MPH and EF-0 tornado damage, because of how quickly it’s moving,” said Auten.
“It was moving 50 MPH, so if there’s rotation, you get all your damage on one edge and you don’t see anything on the other edge.
“If you’re looking at circulation, that left part of the circulation where the wind’s coming back at you would be obscured and you wouldn’t even see it because it’s moving so quickly.”
Peoria received a half an inch of rain, according to the reporting station at General Wayne A. Downing International Airport.
