Long Trail tornado?

[Waumbek]

GMC is still cleaning up after a microburst wind and hail t-storm roared through headquarters on 8/1/05. They're waiting for trail reports to come in on other damage, including the possible tornado on the LT south of Lincoln Gap:

[start quote]The National Weather Service in South Burlington said Richmond was hit by a probable microburst, a violent downdraft in a severe thunderstorm. Winds in parts of Richmond were estimated at 70 mph. Radar images indicated a separate severe thunderstorm might have spawned a tornado that crossed the Long Trail about 3 miles south of Lincoln Gap in Addison County, meteorologists said. A spokeswoman for the Green Mountain Club said she had no immediate reports of a blowdown along the Long Trail, but sometimes it takes days to receive reports of fallen trees blocking trails. [end quote]

 

[weatherman]

Scoured the NWS sites while eating lunch, no reports of any tornadoes. Most weak tornadoes on radar don't end up translating into anything on the ground. But since it was a weekday, and north of the AT, there may not be any reports from the trail for a few days.
Seems like this year, the southern Dacks and the Greens are getting whacked by a lot of storms and a huge amount of rain, while here in Central MA we've had just 0.5 inch of rain since 7/9. Well, there's always hurricane season to think about ...
Weatherman

 

[SteveHiker]

They mentioned the possible tornado on the weather on Channel 9 Monday. It looked like it was further south than that, but then they don't really concentrate on VT on that station, and they only showed it briefly.

It seems like it should be pretty obvious, without having to go on the trail. Two years ago, almost to the day, a similar thing occured in Cavendish (in SE VT). It went thru about 11 o'clock at night. It left a path about 5 miles long and a half mile wide, in which most everything was leveled. Fortunately, there weren't many houses in it's path and no one was hurt. Another 1/4 mile or so east and it would have been a direct hit on most of my family's homes. What it left behind is very impressive, even two years later. Only a few roads cross the path of the storm, one of them used to be dark in the shade even at noontime because of the trees overgrowing it. Now it is very bright in there and looks weird. You can see some of Alexander Solzinetsein's (sp?) house from the road now. And one guy had a large conservation forest on his property which is now basically several acres of firewood and stumps.

 

[Waumbek]

Mt Abraham is the area on the LT where the tornado may have touched down, according to Burlington Free Press report. Anybody hiked Abe this week?

[start quote]

Matt Sutkoski
Free Press Staff Writer

Wild thunderstorms, including a possible tornado in Addison County, flung down trees and cut power in parts of Vermont on Monday while leaving adjacent towns unscathed.
National Weather Service radar images indicated a thunderstorm spinning rapidly, like a top, as it moved from South Lincoln, then toward Mount Abraham and the towns of Granville and Hancock, said Bob Bell, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in South Burlington. Strong rotation in a thunderstorm very often indicates the presence of a tornado.
The storm was in a sparsely populated area, and there was no immediate confirmation that a tornado touched down, Bell said, but his office might dispatch experts to the area today to see whether a twister formed. [end quote]