Roosevelt Taylor salvages tools and building supplies he had stored in a house on Avenue R 1/2 in Galveston Monday. The house was destroyed by a waterspout that came ashore Sunday night.
GALVESTON — A waterspout that swirled ashore, breaking windows, ripping off roofs and a knocking a house from its foundation had an estimated wind speed between 80-90 mph and a path about 100 feet wide, a National Weather Service spokesman said Monday.
Residents emerged Monday morning to survey the damage from an EF-1 tornado, which at 9:48 p.m. Sunday created a skipping path of destruction about a third of a mile, encompassing five blocks.
The twister knocked out power and injured at least three people, one of whom remained hospitalized at the University of Texas Medical Branch, said National Weather Service meterologist Chris McKinney, following a tour of the damage.
The storm damage happened soon after a strong line of storms moved into the county, and the National Weather Service issued a tornado warning. A waterspout is a tornado that forms over water.
Dolphin World, a souvenir shop in the 2900 block of Seawall Boulevard, was damaged about 9:45 p.m. Debris from storm damage covered the streets, and power was knocked out in the area.
Witnesses told The Daily News that a piece of the roof from Dolphin World struck a man who was pushing his bicycle down the seawall.
They said he was taken away by ambulance.
Galveston Police Chief Charles Wiley said two of his officers were hurt when the windows on their patrol cars were blown out by high winds. They were treated at the scene for minor cuts, the chief said.
Power was knocked out to about 4,000 customers, CenterPoint Energy regional manager Keith Gray said. All of those customers, with the exception of the damaged buildings, had power restored by 12:20 a.m., Gray said.
Some saw two twisters Two patrons of Float Bar at 28th Street and Seawall were on the patio of the bar facing the Gulf of Mexico when a storm bearing heavy rain and lightning came ashore.
Vernis Newton of and Adam Noseworthy said they saw two waterspouts. The first moved east to west about 9:30 p.m., but the whirlwind, which was visible both during and between lightning strikes, churned up water and dissipated as it struck the 29th Street rock pier, they said.
“But the second one was massive, and with every lightning strike, it was getting brighter and closer,” Vernis said. The National Weather Service office would only confirm one waterspout.
Noseworthy estimated the second waterspout to be as wide as the bar, roughly 60 to 100 feet across. Noseworthy was transfixed on the whirlwind, standing on the bar’s open-air patio, trying to photograph it with a camera phone.
The twister darted north toward the beach and bar as it came over the seawall, Noseworthy said.
“I was dodging picnic tables, umbrellas and chairs,” Noseworthy said of his last ditch effort to take cover inside.
The twisted metal left on the sidewalk appeared to be part of the roofing sheets from Dolphin World.
Newton and Noseworthy watched as the storm tossed debris, sending it swirling about and blowing out Dolphin World’s glass facade and windows of two police cars.
“Everything started flying everywhere,” Newton said. “Trash cans were flying across the street. I’ve never seen anything like this.”
Bartender Blake Trexler and the bar’s general manager Aubree Martorell saw the spout and began ordering everyone inside and closing windows and lowering the bar’s garage door leading to the patio.
A piece of roof damaged Trexler’s car, he said. Houses damaged
As the twister moved north, it stripped part of the roof from Laura Wilson’s home and shattered her windows.
“I was sitting in the chair watching TV and all the glass came at me,” Wilson said. “I ran through the kitchen and saw the roof came off my bedroom. It was like a big olé gusher.”
After the storm passed, roofline damage was evident at her house in the 2900 block of Avenue R 1/2. Water drained onto her bed. Wilson said she escaped injury.
A relative said a house next door was severely damaged by the tornado, but it was believed to have been vacant.
The twister also bent street signs, toppled a utility pole and lifted roofs from at least one two-story house at 31st Street and Avenue Q 1/2. The storm blew the two-story vacant residence’s roof into Kathleen Fagan’s backyard in the 3000 block of Q 1/2.
“I just put my fence back up after the hurricane, and now it’s down again,” said Fagan, standing in her dark backyard, shinning a flashlight on the pile of debris at least 10 feet high.
The roof likely came from the house that is for sale next door, she said. The house’s second-story weatherboard and window bowed outward without the support of a roof.
“There was no warning,” Fagan said. “I came out to turn off my sprinkler system and things started flying, so I just ran inside. I thought this was just a summer storm until things started flying everywhere.”
The tornado left unscathed a neighbor’s house across the street and just north of the two-story house.
Damage isolated to island There were no other confirmed reports of waterspout or tornado sightings in the county or reports of any additional storm damage. Power was reported to be out in parts of west Galveston County near Santa Fe.
In the midst of the storm, a boat ran aground on a sand bar near Tiki Island. Emergency crews sent a rescue boat, but another boater successfully pulled the stranded boat to safety, officials confirmed.
Texas City police reported there was about 3 inches of water covering portions of Interstate 45, but the freeway remained opened. There were some reports of flooding in Hitchcock.
Weather service meteorologist Patrick Blood said the storm system developed when a drier air mass coming from the north ran into the sea breeze off the Galveston coast.
Daily News weather blogger Stan Blazyk reported several Web cameras he is tied into picked up a funnel cloud about 9:50 p.m.
“The funnel we spotted was a long, narrow gray-colored column that rose from the Gulf up to a low-lying cloud base and was most visible when lightning in the background illuminated the sky,” Blazyk said in his first post about the tornado activity.
