ROXBURY, Conn. — The first tornado of the year in Connecticut was confirmed by the National Weather Service on Monday.
The confirmation comes just days after a funnel cloud was caught on video making its way through farmland in Roxbury on Saturday night. Without that video, the National Weather Service (NWS) may have never investigated because the storm hit after dark and was only lit up by lightning.
Dale Barchi, who was watching the lightning from the storm passing through, said she pulled her phone out as soon as she and her fiancé spotted the funnel cloud.
“It was very, very dark … pitch black … almost like the movie ‘Twister’ in the beginning of it,” she told FOX61 News.
Barchi said she spotted the tornado more than ten times each with a flash of lightning.
“You could see the rotation,” she said. “You could see it forming and everything. We watched it come right down.”
The video Barchi captured – which she shared with FOX61 News after the storm – played the biggest role in the weather service’s decision to visit Bridgewater and Roxbury on Monday.
“It’s pretty easy to say there was a tornado when someone’s got video of it,” Stephen Dirienzo, warning coordination meteorologist with the NWS. “I can definitely say there was a tornado.”
Dirienzo said his initial assessment is that the tornado was probably an EF-Zero because there was little damage.
“The damage that did occur was just to tree limbs,” he said.
Julie Stewart, the executive director of the Bridgewater Land Trust, which owns the land where the tornado hit, said the twister was just another challenge for the local farmers in the area.
“The farmers that farm this land, it’s been very difficult because the fields have been extraordinarily wet,” she said. “It’s been a tough summer.”
This is the second time in just a few weeks that the NWS has been in Connecticut to determine if a tornado touched down.
In late July, NWS meteorologists determined that what was initially called a tornado in eastern Connecticut was actually a funnel cloud. In that storm, the team surveyed the towns of Chaplin, Hampton, Brooklyn, Plainfield and Killingly before making the determination.
The NWS said meteorologists had cited the “presence of what is known as a tornado debris signature” on the radar. However, upon further review, determined that the disturbance was actually a funnel cloud that came “dangerously close to touching down by never did so.”
One of the differences between a tornado and a funnel cloud is whether it touches down.
Ryan Breton is a meteorologist at FOX61 News. He can be reached at rbreton@fox61.com. Follow him on Facebook, X and Instagram
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