© BRETT DZADIKA tornado rips through the parking lot of a Home Depot on Route 9 in Howell, NJ on Saturday morning.
Those bursts of high-speed winds that knocked over trees were as bad as you thought. In fact, two of them were actually tornadoes.
Two tornadoes and a 75-mph microburst were in New Jersey this week, the National Weather Service has confirmed. Both left destruction in their paths.
The weather service said the first tornado was the one seen in the now widely circulated video taken by Brett M. Dzadik at a Home Depot in Howell. That tornado touched down at 7:21 a.m., had wind speeds of up to 75 mph and a path of about 40 yards wide for about a half-mile, the service said.
The second tornado touched down at 7:27 a.m. and also had maximum winds of 75 mph, the weather service said. That tornado caused the damage seen at Oak Glen Park, also in Howell, and traveled about three-tenths of a mile with a path about 25 yards wide, the service said.
On Saturday, in Browns Mills in Burlington County, a "microburst" packing 75-mph winds hit at 7:05 a.m., stretching 1.18 miles.
The tornadoes were spawned by a severe line of thunderstorms - remnants of Tropical Storm Cindy - that dumped heavy rain across much of New Jersey early Saturday morning.
In Browns Mills, a path of damage began on Crescent Drive with several downed trees and power lines. The damage then extended southeast onto Trenton Road, where multiple power poles were downed. Sporadic damage then occurred on Broadway and Pear Roads in Browns Mills. Damage was also noted on either side of Mirror Lake with a few more trees that were taken down, according to the National Weather Service.
A microburst is a convective downdraft with an affected outflow area of less than 2 1/2 miles wide, with peak winds lasting less than 5 minutes. Microbursts may induce dangerous horizontal and vertical wind shears. It can have "tornadic" winds.
Here is a video of one of the tornadoes that hit Howell (viewer discretion advised):
Here is the microburst in Browns Mills:
Here were some other impacts:
Comment: On average the Garden State has two tornadoes annually in the past 20 years, said Sarah Johnson, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service's Mt. Holly office.