ROCKLEDGE — Weak tornadoes swirled to life and briefly touched down Friday in Rockledge and near Fellsmere, the National Weather Service confirmed Saturday morning.
The Rockledge EF-0 tornado lasted less than a minute, forming about 6:30 p.m. just north of Larry L. Shultz Park. The twister destroyed a shed and damaged a carport on Green Road, crossed South Fiske Boulevard, and damaged a pair of homes on Buckingham Court in the Levitt Park neighborhood.
Margie Miles considers herself lucky to be alive. She was sitting on her couch inside her Buckingham Court house when she spotted ominous roiling winds outside her window.
“I started running to the bathroom — and I saw daylight coming in between the hallway and the bathroom. And that’s when it took the roof off the family room,” Miles told FLORIDA TODAY on Friday night.
“I’m still trying to get my head together around this. It just happened too quickly,” Miles said.
Meteorologists estimated the short-lived Rockledge twister packed wind speeds of 60 to 70 mph. That was powerful enough to blast a shed off its pad outside Deborah Enriquez’s Green Road home.
Enriquez returned home from her shift managing at Alamo Mexican Kitchen and discovered twisted metal pieces of her shed strewn across her backyard and atop her fence. Worse, she said someone stole most of the shed’s contents, including stereo equipment, three pressure washers, a generator and an air compressor.
“I never even dreamed this was going to happen to me. But you know what? Luckily, nothing else happened inside my house,” Enriquez said, noting that her small dogs Daphne and Daisy escaped injury.
The Rockledge tornado was spawned when a trio of weather fronts met, said Jessie Smith, a meteorologist at the Melbourne NWS station.
“One large boundary coming in from the interior, from thunderstorms earlier in the day. And then we had the seabreeze, of course, moving towards the west. We actually had another boundary coming up from the south,” Smith said.
“So it was kind of like a three-way collision occurred right over the Rockledge area,” she said.
Saturday morning, Rob Irvine and two workers began removing plywood, tar paper, shingles and other debris from the wind-smashed carport of an unoccupied Buckingham Court rental home near Miles’ tarp-topped house.
“Pulled up this morning, branches everywhere, soffit pieces laying scattered throughout the yard,” Irvine said, walking near the damaged carport.
“And the whole roof had blown over to the left,” Irvine said. The twister also punched a hole in the exterior wall beneath the carport, exposing the kitchen.
The Fellsmere tornado touched down about 5:40 p.m and lasted about three minutes in an uninhabited agricultural area west of the city, midway between Blue Cypress Lake and County Road 512.
The tornado was rated EF-0, with winds estimated at 45 to 55 mph.
“No damage. We had a couple of people who spotted it and took videos of it,” Smith said.
by Rick Neale
August 19, 2017
