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The National Weather Service is investigating whether or not a tornado touched down in the Rye Brook area Tuesday, July 21.
The NWS and Westchester County Office of Emergency Management are evaluating damage reports near Purchase and Rye Brook in Westchester after damage patterns observed between 4 and 4:30 p.m. Tuesday appeared to be consistent with possible tornado activity. The NWS expects to make a determination by Wednesday evening, the agency told The Journal News.
A spokesperson for the Rye Brook Police Department said that, as of Wednesday morning, there were no reports of significant damage or road closures following Tuesday's storm.
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"The damage was minor, and everything has been corrected," the spokesperson said, adding that the storm primarily brought down trees.
Confirmed tornadoes in the region include two in New Jersey's Sussex and Morris counties Tuesday.
'It was really very frightening'
At around 4 p.m. Tuesday, Laurie Landes peeked out the front door of her house on Dorchester Drive in Rye Brook. She watched in shock as fierce gusts flattened the trees dotting her front yard.
“You could hear the wind,” she said. “It looked really unbelievable.”
She said she quickly grabbed her husband, and they headed to the basement.
“I didn't know what was going to come down," said Landes, recalling hearing a large crack while the storm raged. "It was really very frightening."
A thick tree branch had broken off during the storm, crashing through her power lines before falling across her front yard. As of noon Wednesday, her power was still out.
The felled tree was the fourth to fall onto Landes’s property since May. The latest incident took place Fourth of July weekend, when a tree limb tore through a window at the back of her home during violent storms.
“It costs thousands of dollars to take them away,” she said. “We’ve definitely exceeded our tree budget.”
Broken branches and tattered leaves were scattered throughout Landes’s neighborhood on Wednesday morning. Trees, snapped at the trunks, were sprawled across the yards of other nearby homes.
Jordan Magnus, a Rye Brook resident living on Country Ridge Drive, passed through Dorchester Drive on her morning walk. She was shocked by the destruction.
“It’s really bad there,” she said, adding she lives a short walk away and saw no damage to her property. “It’s a night and day difference.”
Magnus recalls seeing heavy rain and hearing blares from sirens at the nearby Blind Brook Club golf course throughout Tuesday evening, but said she experienced nothing that would cause her to think a tornado had touched down nearby.
“We’ve had a couple of power surges, and I didn’t even experience one yesterday,” she said.
Lorie Gierada, who lives a short distance from Landes, moved to Rye Brook six months ago, right after a tornado ripped part of the roof off her house in St. Louis, MO.
When she heard rumors of a potential tornado touching down near her new home yesterday, she said her mind raced right back to the destruction of her old one.
“There was just horrible devastation in our city,” she said. “It’s scary to think that it can just happen that suddenly.”
However, Gierada said she never saw any of the “frightening signs” of a tornado Tuesday, aside from heavy rains.
“The skies didn’t get particularly weird looking or dark,” she said. “The wind didn’t seem to be blowing that hard.”
Regional meteorologists discuss possible tornado in Westchester
Regional meteorologists are claiming a weak tornado briefly touched down at around 4:10 p.m. Tuesday near Rye Brook before making its way toward Greenwich, Connecticut as thunderstorms swept through the area.
In a Facebook post, meteorologist Tyler Jankoski claimed the tornado was likely an EF0 or EF1 on the Enhanced Fujita (EF) scale, which measures tornado intensity based on observed damage. Jankoski, along with other meteorologists, used radar scans to confirm a tornado touchdown.
Rachel Frank, a meteorologist with FOX 61 in Hartford, Connecticut, said Doppler radar detected rotation "indicative of a spinning column" and appeared to show tree branches being lifted into the air.
“The NWS has not confirmed this, but the radar is very convincing,” Frank wrote in a Facebook post.
Tom Jines, a senior meteorologist at Accuweather, said he came to the same conclusion.
"It looked like there was a tornado out of that thunderstorm," he said. "From a radar point of view, it certainly looks like it."
Contributing: lohud's Michelle Grisales and USA TODAY Network New York Connect reporter Alexandra Rivera.
This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: Westchester residents, area meteorologists react to possible tornado
