Did a tornado hit West Paris?

by Duke Harrington
     
     WEST PARIS - They say lightning never strikes the same place twice, but, apparently, the same rule does not apply to tornados.
     In 2002, when Roger Minard was building his home on Stearns Hill Road, in West Paris, an F1 tornado tore through the area. According to the Fujita scale, an F1 twister can generate winds as strong as 112 miles per hour. That's enough to peel back roofing and push vehicles off the road.
     In West Paris in 2002, it picked up plywood from Minard's construction site and dropped it like confetti atop electrical guy wires across the street. The forest in that area also was up-ended, transformed instead into a field of exposed root balls.
     Minard thought having a tornado pass so close to his home would be a once-in-a-lifetime experience. But on Wednesday, April 23, Mother Nature returned for an encore performance.
     "None of the neighbors had any damage," he said, Thursday afternoon. "Up and down the road, it was all quiet. This sucker had my name on it, that's for sure."
     The display, albeit brief, was spectacular. Minard's post barn, 15-feet wide by 24-feet long, landed in his neighbor's horse pasture, about 200 feet from where it stood just moments before.
     "Those horses, they were pretty wide-eyed for awhile, I can tell you," said Minard, Thursday afternoon, while awaiting the appearance of an insurance adjuster. The horses, by that time, had been roped off to a smaller section of their field.
     But was this strike a genuine tornado, or some other type of "twister?"
     According to Mike Cempa, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Gray, the force that hit Minard's barn could not have been a tornado. After all, he says, the sky was a clear blue that day, at least until a gentle rain came late in the evening.
     A true tornado can only descend from out of the clouds, said Cempa. A more likely culprit, he adds, is a "dust-devil."
     "It's kind of unusual to see one that big, but it does happen," said Cempa, Friday. "You sometimes can get them with winds that are fairly strong, although they're not really tornados."
     Whatever hit his barn, Minard knows this much for certain: It was a mighty wind.
     Looking out his window at about 2:50 p.m., Thursday, Minard saw in his back yard a giant funnel of grass, dirt and leaves. The vortex was as tall as the trees at the edge of his lawn, he says, about 75 feet high. Minard confirms Cempa's assessment of the weather that day. There was hardly a cloud in the sky, he recalls, although the air was "very muggy."
     Momentary distracted from the awesome spectacle when his cats tore by "running for their lives," Minard did not see what happened next. Given the roaring winds that are "an everyday occurrence" on Stearns Hill, he didn't hear it either. But when Minard looked back, he saw his shed sitting upside down in the adjacent pasture - the fence marking the property line in nearly as many pieces as the barn.
     "I didn't see the building go because I was looking at the cats. When I turned back, I was like, 'Well, that don't look right,'" explains Minard, in marked understatement. "I said to my wife, 'You're not going to believe this. Come look. It's gone.'"
     The door to the windowless barn - used to store tractors and other yard equipment -was closed at the time. However, the wind appears to have got underneath its 18-inch eaves, where it was able to lift the building off the ground and heave it though a nearby fence.
     If it wasn't a tornado, it was something close, says Minard. The shed was built on eight six-by-six, pressure-treated hemlock posts, each one sunk two feet in to the ground and anchored with winged metal stakes.
     "I tend to overbuild" said Minard, shaking his head in disbelief. "We're in a windy area anyway, but, apparently, I didn't build strong enough for this one. I wouldn't do anything any different though. I thought it was pretty bomb-proof.
     "It lifted it straight up out of the ground," explains Minard, pointing to the post holes. There is no mound of dirt one might expect had the posts been ripped from their moorings. Instead, all eight holes remain are clean and straight as if they'd just been dug.
     But that's not the strangest part, says Minard, pointing to the randomness of nature. While the wind was strong enough to destroy the barn, it didn't so much as ruffle the folded, vinyl tarp laid out in his garden wagon.
     Although data at the Weather Service recommended site, tornadoproject.com, stops at 1995, other online sources say Maine has seen 88 tornados since 1950. Cempa says that "sounds about right." Generally, he notes, Maine can expected one or two small tornados per year.
     No Maine tornado has ever exceeded an F2 (157 mph maximum winds), and only one person has ever been killed by a tornado in Maine - an Aroostook County woman who was literally blown out of her home in 1954.
     The most active year on record was 1971, when 11 tornados caused $2.07 million in damage.
     For Minard, the damage could have been worse. The day before the "tornado" hit, he'd taken his vintage 1953 John Deere tractor out of storage to putter around the yard. By happenstance, instead of putting it back in the barn, he parked it in the garage, closer to the road. Although none of the stored equipment was damaged when the barn sheltering them was ripped from its moorings, the tractor, Minard notes, was taller. More importantly, it still has all of its original glass lights and fixtures
     "[The wind] didn't even knock the wagon off its block, but I'm glad the tractor wasn't in there," says Minard. "The building might have clipped something on the way by and it would have been hard to replace anything."
     Happy with life in Maine, because, "normally, we only have to deal with black flies and snow," Minard is afraid there may be a supernatural explanation for the freak winds which seem to strike his home with such alarming frequency.
     "I'm wondering if I built on an Indian burial ground," he jokes.
     Still, curse or no, for Minard there's one thing left to be done.
     "Now I've got to deal with the cleanup," he says, with a shrug. "And I was just running out of things to do, too."