All About That Tornado That Traveled 12 Miles From Poolesville To Gaithersburg

June 6, 2024

By now, if you live in Montgomery County, Maryland, I am sure you have heard about the tornado yesterday evening on June 5, 2024 unless you are still hiding out in the basement.

This piece will take a look at the details of that Tornado, key information about how the emergency alert system works, and also compare that Tornado to other Tornados spawned from the same storm system.

Tornado Details

According to the National Weather Service, the Tornado was an EF-1 with 105mph winds, 125 Yards wide at most and traveled a lengthy 12 miles causing 5 injuries and 0 deaths (thankfully).

This was the path of the tornado:

Alert Systems Confusion

A lot of people were confused about getting or not getting certain alerts. There are different types of alerts.

  • Ready Montgomery are email and text alerts you have to sign up for (you can do that here).
  • Wireless Emergency Alert (WEA) system, a FEMA managed nationwide alert system.

Earl Stoddard (Assistant Chief Administrative Officer – Montgomery County, MD – Focusing on public safety) had a very informative X/Twitter thread on the different types of alerts and how they work here:

The MoCo Show also reported on this thread if you want to view it without X/Twitter or in one place.

Poll on Alert Systems

We did an informal poll on Facebook via our “MoCo Politics Discussion” Group that had almost 500 people answer as of 11pm 6/6/2024 about if they received an alert and if they were near the storm.

Obviously there are many caveats here as based on the comments, people answered based on different types of alerts, without full knowledge of the alert information presented by Earl Stoddard, and with subjective definitions of being “near” the tornado but it does show some interested data.

Comparison with other Tornados from this storm

You can see the full list of Tornado events that occurred yesterday in this tweet (also below) with all of the details. What is immediately apparent is that the Montgomery County Tornado was unique in that the path length was 12 miles (originally leading to speculation it was multiple separate tornados).

The other 6 Tornados path lengths ranged from .2 to 4.4 with an average of 1.64 (taking out the 4.4 would have been an average of 1.09).

The max width of the Montgomery County tornado was matched or exceeded by only two other tornados of those six and was the only one that caused any injuries (thankfully no deaths reported for any of them). It also matched the top speeds of any of the 6. Two other tornados matched the 105mph and none exceeded it.

Video of Tornado

Tim Pruss of www.mydrone.pro got some incredible footage of this tornado from the sky if you haven’t see it:

Conclusion

In conclusion, it seems like we were incredible lucky to have such limited damage and casualties from this large, powerful and enduring tornado that stretched a distance longer than all other 6 tornados combined.

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