Sparks Fly High: Wild Tornado Caught on Video Tearing Across Interstate

Tornado

Unbelievable video footage from Mary Phan caught the moment on October 27th that a short duration Tornado ripped across Interstate 10 in Orange, Texas approximately 50 miles northeast of Houston near Beaumont and Port Arthur.

 

The footage is terrifying and shows the tornado carve a path of destruction through the properties on either side of the empty freeway as it crosses, snapping powerlines as it goes causing electrical arcs and sparks to fly with debris as they break and short circuit on the wet pavement.

According to Local affiliate Fox7, “Phan tells Storyful that she saw debris and what she thought was a fire and then she looked over and saw the tornado.

“It was much closer to me than the video is showing,” Phan said. “It was scary, and I thought about driving off the road to get away from it.”

According to Storyful, “Mary Phan recorded this video and originally posted it to Facebook. Phan told Storyful she was driving when she saw debris, and what she thought was a fire. She said she looked over then and saw the tornado.”

Earlier that morning, the National Weather Service at Fort Worth reported a massive line of storms as it passed through the Dallas-Fort Worth area hours before and warned of a possible “brief spin up tornado” that is consistent with what happened at Orange some 100 miles to the southwest.

Subsequently, about five hours later NWS Houston issued a Tornado watch for an area ranging from Port Arthur all the way to Lafayette, Louisiana calling for 70 mile per hour gusts of wind, “likely tornados” and quarter-sized hail.

This watch was followed by almost a dozen severe thunderstorm and tornado warnings from Houston to the Gulf coast over the next 3 to 4 hours as the line of storms struck the area around 8:21 AM. In the radar image shared by NWS Houston the large storm cell that spawned the twister is visible on the I10 near Beaumont as the loop begins.

Just because it’s October in Texas doesn’t mean that Tornado season is really over, granted May thru June are normally the worst but, those storm sirens can always wail. Mary’s original video caption, notable for it’s brevity really does say it all: “#texasweather”.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Related Posts