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EF1 tornado in Winn Parish, Louisiana

Tornado May 28, 2017 · Winn Parish, Louisiana

EF1
Rating
1.2 mi
Whole path
564 yd
Path width

NOAA records this tornado county by county. Its path ran through Winn Parish → Winn Parish; the totals above are for the whole tornado.

EF0EF1EF2EF3EF4EF5Unrated

The path drawn at its surveyed width of 564 yards (0.32 mi) — zoom in and the swath grows to true scale. Other tornadoes recorded nearby that day are shown faint.

What EF1 means. On the Enhanced Fujita scale, EF1 is moderate damage: roofs badly stripped, mobile homes pushed off foundations or overturned, windows broken, consistent with estimated gusts of 86–110 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

An EF-1 tornado with maximum estimated winds of around 95 mph touched down in the Kisatchie National Forest just east of Saline Bayou along Parish Road 964. Numerous hardwood and softwood trees were snapped and uprooted as the tornado traveled south-southeast through the forest and roughly parallel to the bayou before lifting along Barnett Road.

The wider storm

Overnight showers and thunderstorms which held together into the morning hours of Sunday May 28th, moved into Northern Louisiana from the northwest during the morning hours after daybreak. Isolated severe thunderstorms developed near Bossier City during the mid-morning hours, producing numerous reports of penny to quarter size hail. These storms mostly dissipated by midday, leaving numerous outflow boundaries across the area. Meanwhile, a warm front moving northward into the area resulted in dew points quickly rising from the mid 60s to the mid 70s with its passage. This front stalled out near the Interstate 30 corridor of Northeast Texas, and south of this boundary, scattered thunderstorms quickly developed by mid-afternoon and spread east across East Texas near and south of the Interstate 20 corridor. These storms rapidly intensified during peak afternoon heating and instability, and produced numerous reports of wind damage across extreme Eastern Texas and North Louisiana.

In addition to widespread straight line winds which exceeded 80-90 mph at times as they organized into a large scale bow echo, isolated tornadoes also touched down south and east of Natchitoches. Training storms moving west to east also producing brief flash flooding at some locations. These storms overall had only shown very slight weakening trends by the time they entered Central Louisiana after 10 pm that evening. In the storms' wake, over 103,000 customers were left without power across East Texas and Western Louisiana in the AEP SWEPCO coverage area, which was the 4th worst storm (with outages) in the company's 105 year history.

Began near Coldwater (31.9719, -92.8796).

Other tornadoes from the same storm system

1 more tornado the National Weather Service filed under this storm episode.

Source: NOAA Storm Events Database, event 691702. Narratives are written by the National Weather Service forecast office that issued the report.

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