EF1 tornado in Kanawha County, West Virginia

An EF1 tornado with maximum winds of 100 miles per hour began in the St. Albans Park, where significant uprooting trees oriented in a north-northeast direction was observed along City Park Drive. On the adjacent side of the road there was a mixture of hard and softwood trees that were either uprooted or snapped, oriented in a southeast direction indicating a clear converging damage swath. Based on a combination of drone footage and ground surveys, it was determined that the tornado skipped eastward, embedded in a larger swath of straight-line wind damage, from St. Albans to Jefferson, before crossing over the Kanawha River into Dunbar, and finally ending in the Roxalana area. This was a non-continuous path with several noted areas of concentrated damage.

In St. Albans, several homes just west of Cunningham Memorial Park were damaged from fallen hardwood and softwood trees of decent size and health. One home was missing a section of wall on the east side of the structure. Multiple homes in the area of Hughes Drive, Lotus Road, and Squires Drive received damage from mixed hardwood and softwood trees that had fallen. Some of the trees were rather large and healthy.

In Jefferson, several trees of mixed hardwood and softwood along MacCorckle Avenue, Kanawha Terrace, Hampshire Drive, and Campbell Lane were uprooted or snapped with some falling on homes. Drone footage showed a path of convergent tree damage descending a hill and crossing Route 60, close to where a roof of a home was blown off.

After crossing the river over to Dunbar, several trees around Dutch Hollow, Grandview, and into Roxalana Road were either snapped or uprooted with some siding and shingle damage noted to several homes and apartment buildings. A large billboard on Fairlawn Avenue, next to a restaurant and Interstate 64, was knocked over onto a car.

A strong area of low pressure tracking through the Ohio Valley caused multiple rounds of thunderstorms across the state of West Virginia on April 2nd and 3rd. The first round that occurred on the 2nd took the form of an intense squall line that raced across the southern and central portions of the state during the late morning and midday hours. This caused extensive wind damage, with a 92 mile per hour wind gust measured at the Huntington Tri-State Airport, along with at least nine embedded tornadoes in a corridor from Huntington to east of Charleston. In addition to damage associated with the tornadoes, over 100 locations reported non-tornadic wind damage.

Additional thunderstorms later in the afternoon produced another tornado in the Hico community of Fayette County. The ten confirmed tornadoes during this event is a record for the most tornadoes observed during any event in the state of West Virginia.

To top it all off, the multiple rounds of thunderstorms also resulted in excessive rainfall amounts for parts of the state. This resulted in several instances of flash flooding of creeks and streams with reported road closures due to high water, primarily during the evening of April 2nd. The transition to generalized flooding occurred during the early morning of April 3rd due to the response from larger creeks. Considerable runoff from this rainfall caused river flooding along the Tygart Valley River and its tributaries, and very heavy rainfall over Pennsylvania from these same storms led to moderate to major flooding on the Ohio River between April 4th to the 6th. One fatality occurred in Wood County on the 4th when a motorist entered flood waters and their vehicle overturned and then submerged.