Officials in Lincoln County aren’t reporting any major damage from a severe storm that passed through the area Thursday afternoon. The National Weather Service received a report of a tornado touching down near Canton, but it may be difficult to determine the tornado’s strength.
Harold Timmerman is the Lincoln County Emergency Management Director. He says Thursday’s storm left minor tree damage by Canton, but no significant hail damage. He says Harrisburg received two to two and a half inches of rain, but the city crews were able to take care of small issues before they became problems. He says his spotters reported funnel clouds and rotation, but they did not see any tornadoes.
“We did have a lot of spotters out around Canton, including Sherriff’s deputies and we never could verify a funnel on the ground,” Timmerman says. “We were prepared to blow sirens if we thought it was warranted, but we could not see anything down on the ground at any point in time, so we did not set off sirens.”
Officials with the National Weather Service in Sioux Falls say a storm chaser spotted a tornado near highway eleven between Harrisburg and Canton. Meteorologist Philip Schumacher says that’s consistent with what he saw on the radar. He says ranking the strength of a tornado is dependent on the damage it caused.
“How big were the trees that were blown down,” Schumacher says. “Was there damage to homes? If so, what kind of damage? Roofs coming off or walls taken down or that type of thing. And then based on that we try to get an estimate of the wind speed.”
He says the next step is to talk with Lincoln County officials.
“Find out what they saw,” Schumacher says. “Evidently they didn’t really see anything. So at most, given there’s no damage, if we don’t receive any damage report, and given that we only have on individual report we’ll determine it was a tornado that just briefly touched down so basically not very many people could see it and it did no damage, or else we’ll have to reassess whether there was a tornado.”
Schumacher says tornadoes that touch down in open, unpopulated areas are usually rated EF-0, because there’s little damage and therefore no way to determine how strong the winds were.