A FARMER DESCRIBED how he and his colleagues were “totally scared” after a tornado struck a farm in Co Derry yesterday.
Ten people escaped unharmed after the tornado ripped the roof off a barn and destroyed a car when it collapsed a wall. Farmer Fergie Kelly said he thought a bomb had gone off when they heard a loud bang, BBC News reports.
He described how he and his co-workers had been trimming cows feet in the barn near Eglington, east of the city of Derry, when the incident occurred:
The cows all stampeded … We saw a tornado going down through the field.The tin was hurled into the air, along with the roof trusses and blocks and a lot of other debris. It was quite a scary experience.
He described how the shed roof lifted off into the air but added that, thankfully, no one was hurt in the incident.
Irish Weather Online forecaster Fergal Tierney said that the current thunderstorm weather conditions meant that the possibility of further tornadoes or funnels, which become tornadoes when they hit the surface, could be more likely in the coming days:
Vigorous upward air currents develop as heated pockets of air at the surface rise through the cold air above.These updrafts can develop rotation and in some cases become vertically aligned, forming a funnel that extends from the base of the cloud.
Watch one of the funnel clouds that emerged during a thunderstorm near Maghera in Northern Ireland on Tuesday, caputured by Nightskyhunter.com:
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