Yesterday’s Storm COULD Have been a Tornado

The radar of the storms that rolled though El Paso and Las Cruces last night showed that conditions COULD have produced an actual tornado. In fact, wind gusts of up to 90 miles per hour were as strong as those produced by a tornado.

As it turned out, no tornado was actually produced. But the extremely high winds did plenty of damage: trees were uprooted in Cruces as well as El Paso. The visibility, which was down to zero, led to a multi-vehicle accident near Lordsburg. Also, about 17,000 El Paso Electric customers lost power. A tweet this morning from the electric company said about 3,500 customers are STILL without power (as of about 5 am Monday morning).

There have been a few reports of hailstones during the storm. I can verify it: there WAS some hail. I know because it was pelting me when I had to run (and I do mean “run”) outside…and turn off the sprinklers. That’s correct. I knew there was a chance of rain in the forecast, but I decided to let the sprinklers run anyway. The lagoon that was once my cul-de-sac informed me that I could have skipped it.

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Here’s video from Las Cruces where you can really see not only the dust but also the strength of the wind. Check out the neighbor’s tree in this video. It’s going to and fro like one of those inflatable tube dancers at the grand opening of a mattress store :

This video from El Paso gives you an idea of the flooding, but also the wind MOVING the rain in the street:

Finally, here’s video of how bad the weather actually got in El Paso yesterday:

Thanks to our reporter pal Robert Holguin from CBS-4 for his fine reporting from the Rio Grande.