Tornado hits Salem causing property damage but no injuries (2024)

A tornado spun a 2-mile path through a residential section of Salem Sunday evening, damaging houses and toppling trees with 100 to 105 mph winds but causing no injuries.

The National Weather Service classified the storm as an EF-1 tornado, on the low end of a scale from EF-0 to EF-5.

The twister touched down at about 6:15 pm near the intersection of Karen Drive and Joan Circle in West Salem, snapping tree trunks and blowing down branches as it moved eastward, the weather service said in a statement Monday.

Roofing material was ripped from several homes and apartment buildings south of the Roanoke River before the tornado lifted just east of Electric Road, near the intersection of Midland and Easton roads, the service said.

The winds dislodged a large section of a metal roof from a Front Avenue home and carried it about 150 feet across the street, where it landed in Wyatt Palmer’s front yard.

“It was like a damn kite in the air,” Palmer said from a rocking chair on his front porch Monday afternoon — looking at a tangled mass of metal that he estimated weighed several hundred pounds.

Palmer said he had been cutting grass, just a few feet from where the rooftop landed, when he saw the storm approach and quickly headed inside.

“I just happened to look up and saw it coming through the treetops, black as black could be,” he said. “It came through and took everything with it.”

Across the street, Deborah and Tim Plue sat on the front porch of their home, which now lacks a piece of its roof that they said sailed over a power line before it crashed into Palmer’s yard.

“It was wild,” Deborah Plue said of the storm. “It looked like it just landed in my back yard and it blew everything everywhere.”

“I still can’t find my garbage can,” Tim Plue said.

The tornado was gone in a minute or two — but not before the Plues realized how much danger they were in.

“When I saw everything spinning, and big branches going through the air, yeah, that scared the hell out of me,” Tim Plue said.

A local physician and weather watcher, Dr. Tyler Anderson, posted images on social media Sunday night that showed what he described as a “funnel and rotating debris cloud on the ground, with power flashes.”

The maximum width of the tornado’s path was about 300 yards, according to the weather service.

“Remarkably, there were no injuries or fatalities, and very limited damage to structures,” Salem spokesman Mike Stevens wrote in an email. Workers with the city’s Electric Department had restored power Monday to several hundred affected customers.

Confirmed tornados are very rare in the Roanoke Valley.

“Floods… yes, a Derecho… yes, but a tornado coming in between the Blue Ridge and Allegheny mountains like that is incredibly unique,” Stevens wrote in an email.

In Roanoke, strong winds on Sunday pushed the roof of a commercial building onto a neighboring business on the 2600 block of Roanoke Avenue Southwest, “resulting in significant damage,” the city’s Fire-EMS Department reported. No additional details were available.

Elsewhere in the region, the same fast-moving storm that spawned the tornado left more than 10,000 Appalachian Power Co. customers without electricity as of 5:30 p.m. Monday.

The outages stretched from north of Lynchburg, through the Roanoke Valley to the West Virginia line. Two of the larger blackouts were in Giles County, with 2,400 outages as of 5:30 p.m. Monday and Pulaski County, with more than 2,100 customers without power.

Roanoke County had 502 customers without electricity and Roanoke had 328 as of 7 p.m. Monday, the company reported.

More than 3,000 emergency powerline workers were on the job during the Memorial Day holiday, nearly half of them from other states as far away as Alabama and Michigan.

“Damage is widepread,” Appalachian spokesman George Porter wrote in an email. “There remain over 1,450 locations where repairs need to be made before power can safely be restored.”

In a statement issued late Sunday, Appalachian said that more than 100,000 customers were without power at that time between Virginia, Tennessee and West Virginia. The total was down to 40,000 by Monday evening.

The company said: “In Virginia and Tennessee, Appalachian Power anticipates having service restored to approximately 90 percent of affected customers by 11 p.m., Tuesday. Areas with less damage will likely be restored earlier.”