It didn’t take officials long to confirm local suspicion that the storm that hit the town of Dublin on Thursday was a tornado.
“A storm survey team from the National Weather Service office in Gray, Maine, has confirmed that a tornado touched down in Dublin, New Hampshire, during the afternoon on July 27 2023. The damage observed by the team to this point is consistent with an EF-1 tornado with maximum winds of 90-95 mph,” the NWS said in a preliminary report Friday. “The survey team is investigating additional damage.”
The National Weather Service defines an EF-1 tornado as wind gusts between 86 and 110 mph. It is the lowest in a five-step measurement of tornado strength.
The storm caused damage in a number of towns roughly along the western part of the Route 101 corridor. So far only the Dublin damage has been confirmed to have been a tornado.
Carol Connare, an editor for The Old Farmer’s Almanac, was huddled in the basement of the Yankee Publishing headquaters on Main Street. At approximately 2:45 p.m., cellphones lit up with tornado warnings across the office.
“Around three, we started to get into the basement, there’s probably maybe a few more than a dozen people [in the basement],” said Connare. “So none of us saw anything and the power went out.”
In the dark basement the sounds of the storm became evident.
“When the power went out, all of this buzzing started to happen,” said Connare. “So we’re in the basement with a lot of just like darkness and buzzing.”
Thursday’s storm was the first tornado confirmed for 2023 in New Hampshire, which saw two tornadoes in 2022. The state typically gets one or two confirmed tornados annually, although it has had as many as eight in one year. It is extremely unusual for any tornado here to be stronger than EF-1.
Confirming that storm damage is caused by a tornado involves a number of factors but the most important is the direction of debris, such as downed trees. A twisting storm will send debris in many directions as opposed to pushed down in one direction.
The state’s biggest tornado passed through the Concord area almost exactly 15 years ago, on July 24, 2008. It created a 50-mile path of destruction, the longest on record in New England.
Tornadoes are most common in New England when warm air comes up from the south, creating a strong shear in which winds change direction as you go up in altitude.
In an unrelated matter, Gov. Sununu on Friday requested a federal disaster declaration for weather damage caused by flooding from torrential rain and high minds from April 30 to May 1. The statement says that initial damage estimates made by officials show that the level of damage was high enough to warrant the declaration, which makes communities eligible for low-cost loans and other support.
(Aidan Bearor of the Monadnock Ledger-Transcript contributed to this report.)
