Freak weather phenomenon damages local nursery
Posted By: Joshua Aldredge Web Editor: Tim Geraghty
6 hrs ago
Standale, Mich. (WZZM) - It only lasted about ten seconds, but it left behind a lot of damage.
A landspout swept through a nursery in the 100 block of Lincoln Street in Standale Sunday afternoon.
Those that witnessed it say it was like something from a movie.
They never saw it coming until the landspout was already on the ground tossing debris about 30 feet in the air as it crossed the property.
Wikipedia describes landspouts this way:
A landspout is a slang-term coined by meteorologist Howard B. Bluestein in the early 1980s for a kind of tornado not associated with the mesocyclone of a thunderstorm.
The Glossary of Meteorology defines a landspout as
"Colloquial expression describing tornadoes occurring with a parent cloud in its growth stage and with its vorticity originating in the boundary layer. The parent cloud does not contain a preexisting midlevel mesocyclone. The landspout was so named because it looks like a weak Florida Keys waterspout over land."
"We were standing by the pond and we heard the wind whip through one of the coops and I looked over and saw the debris up in the air," said Casey Kazmier, who witnessed the landspout.
One of the owners grabbed her dog and laid in a ditch until the landspout passed through. No one was injured.
