© Tillamook Headlight-HeraldDamage to Manzanita Cones & Coffee from a tornado that touched down in Manzanita, Oregon, on Friday morning.
A small coastal town in Oregon was clobbered on Friday by a rare tornado that ripped roofs from buildings, toppled trees and tore down power lines as the first of two storm systems forecast this weekend unleashed high winds and heavy rain across the Pacific Northwest.
The twister left most of Manzanita, a community of some 600 permanent residents in the northwest corner of Oregon, without electricity and more than two dozen homes uninhabitable, though no injuries were reported, City Manager Jerry Taylor said.
The tornado was spawned by a major Pacific storm sweeping coastal portions of Oregon and Washington state even as the region braced for harsher weather forecast by the National Weather Service from remnants of a typhoon expected to arrive on Saturday.
High winds, gusting to gale-force speeds, were reported by the weather service across the Puget Sound area of Washington with more than 100 lightning strikes recorded over coastal waters in a single hour at one point.
The weather service said about 20,000 Seattle-area homes and businesses were without electricity on Friday morning.
Beginning as a waterspout first spotted just offshore, the Manzanita tornado raked a half-mile long path of destruction through commercial and residential sections of town just after 8 a.m. local time, much of it along the community's main street.
Comment: The National Weather Service in Portland later
rated the twister an EF2. A second tornado was spotted in Oceanside.
The funnel is only the second tornado to hit the state this year,
said weather.com senior meteorologist Jonathan Erdman, the only other touching down on June 8 in Wheeler County. Previously there had been only 4 tornadoes on record since 1950 in Tillamook County, Erdman said. The last occurred on Sep. 18, 1997.
Comment: See also: Rare tornado hits Oregon as Pacific Northwest braces for more extreme weather