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EF2 tornado in Christian County, Kentucky

Tornado May 2, 2010 · Christian County, Kentucky

EF2
Rating
9.5 mi
Path length
300 yd
Path width
$300K
Damage as recorded
EF0EF1EF2EF3EF4EF5Unrated

The path drawn at its surveyed width of 300 yards (0.17 mi) — zoom in and the swath grows to true scale. Other tornadoes recorded nearby that day are shown faint.

What EF2 means. On the Enhanced Fujita scale, EF2 is considerable damage: roofs torn off well-built houses, mobile homes destroyed, large trees snapped or uprooted, consistent with estimated gusts of 111–135 mph. The rating comes from a survey of the worst damage after the storm, not from a wind measurement, so it says as much about what the tornado hit as about how strong it was.

What the National Weather Service wrote

The highest concentrations of damage were where the tornado crossed State Route 1348 west of Crofton and Route 407 north of Crofton. Three unoccupied mobile homes were severely damaged or destroyed on Route 1348 west of Crofton. On Route 407, two mobile homes suffered moderate to major damage and a garage was levelled. The roof was peeled off one of the mobile homes. This tornado was very near the site of an EF3 tornado in Mannington just over a year earlier. One of the victims whose home was destroyed in the previous year's tornado relocated to a new spot, only to have her new home receive minor damage in this tornado. Several barns along the damage path received minor to moderate damage. Hundreds of trees were uprooted or snapped, particularly on Route 407 and nearby U.S. Highway 41. The tornado damage path began along Highway 109 and ended just after crossing the Pennyrile Parkway. The EF-2 tornado damage was near the end of the damage path along Route 407 and U.S. Highway 41, where hundreds of trees were uprooted or snapped. The average path width was 275 yards. Peak winds were estimated near 120 mph. The supercell that spawned this tornado later produced a separate brief tornado in Hopkins County.

The wider storm

A surface cold front extended from the Chicago area southwestward across the eastern fringes of the St. Louis metro area to a weak low pressure center over southeast Missouri. The low ejected northeast across southern and eastern Illinois, with the trailing cold front moving east across the Lower Ohio Valley. A broken cluster of severe thunderstorms, with embedded supercells and small bow echoes, moved east-northeastward across western Kentucky. Increasing south-southwesterly low level winds brought plenty of moisture northward into the Lower Ohio Valley, aiding in sufficient destabilization for supercells. The two primary supercells of the night followed similar paths across southern parts of the Purchase area, the Lakes region, and the southern Pennyrile region. Heavy rainfall with the storms, in combination with saturated ground from the May 1 storms, produced localized flash flooding.

Began near Era (37.0571, -87.5981).

Other tornadoes from the same storm system

3 more tornadoes the National Weather Service filed under this storm episode.

Source: NOAA Storm Events Database, event 223882. Narratives are written by the National Weather Service forecast office that issued the report.

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