NWS considers classifying Santa Cruz waterspout as tornado
UPDATE 01/07/19 5:45 p.m. A waterspout was spotted off the coast of Santa Cruz, Sunday afternoon, before it roared across the Santa Cruz Wharf.
The manager of The Dolphin Restaurant, located at the end of the wharf, told KION that the waterspout tore part of the roof off the restaurant.
Manager Michael Gangloff said it was, “really gnarly shaking on the windows, then we saw a big piece of our roof fly off into the ocean.”
He said after a short time they realized water was leaking into the back part of the restaurant and they closed for the rest of the day.
“The city inspector was down here today and said it wasn’t that bad so definitely just some cleanup and getting the roofers down here to fix everything,” Gangloff says about 35% of the roof was torn off.
Watsonville resident Anne Sanchez was also on the wharf when the roof was ripped off. She said “all of a sudden there was this rumbling, and it made us all turn around, and it felt like there was a large truck on the wharf – Or it was, what I thought, was an earthquake.”
There were no reports of any injuries.
Officials with the National Weather Service came out to the wharf on Monday to survey the damage.
Brian Garcia, a NWS Warning Coordination Meteorologists, says “you would have to get wind speeds upward of 80, maybe plus miles per hour in order to see the roof torn off like this.”
The NWS said they are now considering classifying Sunday’s waterspout as a tornado.
“The compounding factor here of course is you know behind us is all water, so it was a water spout, but technically when a water spout touches land, and we just so happen to be standing on solid ground that is over water technically when it touches land, it becomes a tornado, so the next question is how do we classify this? It will probably end up being classified as a tornado,” says Garcia.
Gangloff says they are aiming to reopen the restaurant by Friday.
PREVIOUS STORY:
A waterspout was spotted off the coast of Santa Cruz, Sunday afternoon, and roared across the Santa Cruz Wharf before reaching shore.
The manager of The Dolphin Restaurant, located on the wharf, told KION that the waterspout tore part of the roof off the restaurant. The restaurant was closed for the remainder of the afternoon, before repairs could happen Monday morning.
Watsonville resident Anne Sanchez was on the wharf when the roof was ripped off. She said “all of a sudden there was this rumbling, and it made us all turn around, and it felt like there was a large truck on the wharf – Or it was, what I thought, was an earthquake.”
There were no reports of any injuries.
The NWS said they are now considering classifying Sunday’s waterspout as a tornado.
KION’s Ashley Keehn explains at 5 and 6 p.m.
{“url”:”https://twitter.com/NWSBayArea/status/1082415998488080384″,”author_name”:”NWS Bay Area”,”author_url”:”https://twitter.com/NWSBayArea”,”html”:”&#lt;blockquote class=”twitter-tweet”&#gt;&#lt;p lang=”en” dir=”ltr”&#gt;Team on storm damage survey today viewed the roof at the Dolphin restaurant, Santa Cruz Wharf, to help determine wind speed. Preliminary results are EF-0 &#lt;a href=”https://twitter.com/hashtag/tornado?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”&#gt;#tornado&#lt;/a&#gt; @ 80-85 mph.&#lt;br&#gt;Full report for this and the West Cliff tornado should be out this evening.&#lt;a href=”https://twitter.com/hashtag/cawx?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”&#gt;#cawx&#lt;/a&#gt; &#lt;a href=”https://t.co/BaanEsQfsJ”&#gt;pic.twitter.com/BaanEsQfsJ&#lt;/a&#gt;&#lt;/p&#gt;– NWS Bay Area (@NWSBayArea) &#lt;a href=”https://twitter.com/NWSBayArea/status/1082415998488080384?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”&#gt;January 7, 2019&#lt;/a&#gt;&#lt;/blockquote&#gt;n&#lt;script async src=”https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js” charset=”utf-8″&#gt;&#lt;/script&#gt;n”,”width”:550,”height”:null,”type”:”rich”,”cache_age”:”3153600000″,”provider_name”:”Twitter”,”provider_url”:”https://twitter.com”,”version”:”1.0″}
