Today was an exciting day for the retired weather forecaster lurking inside of me. It started out innocent enough. I put the TV on this morning and told Nan that it was going to be a nasty day. There were storms moving east out of Louisiana. I helped a friend change the battery in her car and when I got back home I monitored the FWB PD on the scanner. I heard an EAS alert around 2:30 on FM 105.5 and posted a note to friends in Enterprise AL to keep an eye out and I put the TV on to watch WeatherNation. At 4:08 PM I got a simultaneous alert on my phone and on the TV. So I went in the back yard to see if I could see anything and moved to the front yard. I could hear the tornado siren going off on Hurlburt Field 4 miles away. I got my phone and shot video.
With the trees around the neighborhood, my view was obscured, unknown to me, the tornado was about 3/4 east of me when I got my phone. I thought I saw a glimpse of the funnel east down Holmes Blvd. I’m sure I saw it, I went to get my phone to take a picture of it but when I got back outside it was gone. The siren can clearly be heard on the clip I recorded. The video to my NE during this time was clearly very dark. Again, I caught a glimpse on a portion of the funnel but couldn’t frame it on the phone’s display.
I went inside and started monitoring radio traffic from the FWB PD. Over the next 45 minutes the path of the tornado started to become clear based on radio traffic. Photos and video coming from Facebook and Twitter halped me firm up what the path was. My guess is that it was an F1, possibly an F2. I guess we’ll see.