Residents of Loughmore, Co Tipperary have described a weather event on Friday that blew the roofs off of two hay sheds as a ‘mini-tornado’.
Swirling wind and rain descended on the village at about 11am and Maureen Cullen first noticed the change as her clothes line started to spin – gradually at first and then very quickly.
“The roof of the hay shed took off and it flew over the house,” she said. “Some of it hit the slates on the house so we have two holes in the roof now. We’re fairly near the road; it went across the road, over the electric wires and over a bungalow across from us.”
The Cullens’ shed is a large, corrugated structure and its floating roof could have posed a significant danger to anyone caught underneath it.
“It was terrible but it could have been a lot worse,” Cullen added. “Thank God there was nobody on the road. There were no cars passing, there was nobody walking and there was nobody out.”
Maureen’s husband Tom, who recently turned 80, was born in the house in Loughmore. Neither he nor his wife had ever seen such a dramatic shift in the weather in the area. Maureen Cullen said it all occurred in the space of a couple of minutes.
“The house a couple of hundred yards down the road from us, they lost the roof of a shed as well,” she said. “The gentleman [living there] is 60 and his grandfather planted apple trees – they’re all just lying flat now.”
CCTV has captured, what locals have described as a “mini-tornado”, passing through Loughmore, Co Tipperary.
A Met Éireann spokesman said the forecaster would not be able to verify whether a tornado did indeed occur in Loughmore.
However, he said it was possible and “not something that we haven’t seen happen before”.
Data shows there was showery and very localised thunderstorm activity around the time of the event, and tornadoes can go unrecorded in Ireland.
On its website, Met Éireann explains that the term ‘mini-tornado’ came into use to distance the sorts of tornadoes Ireland experiences from the much larger ones regularly recorded in the United States.
The meteorological service estimates that, on average, there are 10 such tornado occurrences in Ireland each year.