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EF0 tornado in East Baton Rouge Parish, Louisiana

Tornado August 12, 2016 · East Baton Rouge Parish, Louisiana

EF0
Rating
0.3 mi
Path length
25 yd
Path width
$200K
Damage as recorded
EF0EF1EF2EF3EF4EF5Unrated

The path drawn at its surveyed width of 25 yards (0.01 mi) — zoom in and the swath grows to true scale. Other tornadoes recorded nearby that day are shown faint.

What EF0 means. On the Enhanced Fujita scale, EF0 is light damage: shingles and siding peeled, gutters torn, branches broken, consistent with estimated gusts of 65–85 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

Numerous trees blown down or snapped about 30 feet off the ground. Multiple buildings with roof and/or chimney damage. Power lines knocked down. A double carport was destroyed and a 15,000 pound fifth wheel camper rolled over.

The wider storm

A slow moving low pressure system brought widespread showers and thunderstorms to the area. The system tapped into deep tropical moisture resulting in very intense rainfall across a large portion of the area. Two-day rainfall totals of 10 inches or more were common across areas generally to the west and northwest of Lakes Pontchartrain and Maurepas. The heaviest rainfall occurred across a swath of East Baton Rouge, Livingston, and St. Helena Parishes, where 20 to 30 inches fell over a 48-hour period, topping the 0.1% annual exceedance probability. The heavy rainfall led to widespread flash flooding and record river flooding. Many of the broken records had been set during the flooding of April 1983. In total, 12 people died in southeast Louisiana as a result of the flooding. The event was also responsible for an estimated total of ten billion dollars in damage across southern Louisiana and southern Mississippi. This estimate includes impacts of both the initial flash flooding and the resultant river flooding.

Began near Puckett (30.5889, -91.0316).

Source: NOAA Storm Events Database, event 657208. Narratives are written by the National Weather Service forecast office that issued the report.

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