EF1 Tornado — Butts, Georgia

2023-01-12 · near Towaliga, Butts, Georgia

Event narrative

This tornado spun up quickly along Windy Lane before striking a large warehouse along Midway drive. Sections of the roof were torn off and thrown northeastward into the parking lot and nearby woods. The tornado snapped a few trees before crossing I75 just south of Hwy 16 before crossing Mattie Thomason Road, Colwell Road and paralleling Hwy 16 snapping and uprooting trees along both sides of the highway. The tornado lifted after crossing Joe Lane road and around High Falls road.

Wider weather episode

A line of strong thunderstorms moved into north and central Georgia during the afternoon through the evening on Thursday, January 12th and spawned numerous tornadoes, including several that were long track and significant. Ahead of this line, a few supercells also spawned tornadoes in portions of central and eastern Georgia. Upon further examination of radar data and high resolution areal imagery, it was found that several tornadoes rotated around and within a larger vortex and caused the widespread damage in the area near Griffin GA, over 2 miles wide in some cases.

The result was that as many as 4 tornadoes were on the ground simultaneously in SW Spalding County, which were rotating around the larger circulation, merging together in several cases and crossing paths. The presence of 3 mergers was identified in the reanalysis. Additional analysis revealed that wind speeds in the EF3 storm reached

as high as 155mph or high end EF3. This confirmed a total of 14 tornadoes, including 10 which resulted from the same storm/larger mesocyclone.

View location on OpenStreetMap → (33.2430, -84.1140)

Source: NOAA Storm Events Database, event_id 1079343. Narrative written by the NWS forecast office that issued the report.