A barrage of tornado activity descended on the city of Carey Thursday night resulting in some $100,000 in damage, estimated Blaine County Sheriff Walt Femling.
"We were dispatched to Carey for downed power lines," Femling said in his weekly press conference Monday. A downtown transformer was blown in the event.
When police arrived they found that a portion of the roof had been ripped off the shop of M&J Motor Co. and sent into the southbound lane of Main Street.
"There was wood and shingles scattered all over the road in front of the shop," said M&J mechanic Brian O'Crowley, who lives just down the street and said he arrived back on the scene five minutes after the tornado hit.
A portion of the roof material crushed the cab of a 1995 Ford pickup truck that was parked alongside the repair shop, Femling said.
Mike Adamson, one of the owners of M&J, said the tornado blew in four of five bay doors on the building when the roof was destroyed. The Adamson family is in the process of tallying up the damage with their insurance company.
"It's a good thing no one was there," he said.
His brother, Craig Adamson, owner of Adamson's Shell Station and convenience store, just north on Main Street, said he also sustained damage to the roof of his warehouse.
"I've heard about boards or branches going through windows and five big trees that were (uprooted)," he said.
Craig Adamson also said a power pole across the street was shoved deeper into the ground. As the twister made its way up Main Street toward the Carey Fairgrounds, he said, he was inside his house pushing on the door to keep it closed as cars were buffeted and bounced outside.
"Behind my house it ripped my neighbors' tree out and dropped it on my swing set and trampoline," he said.
At MK Trailers, also on Main Street, several trailers were pushed out of the lot and into the road, Femling said. "They were moved and damaged."
In total three tornado spouts were reported to have touched down in Carey at around 8 p.m. Two twisters hit downtown and a third made contact several miles southwest of Carey, which reportedly damaged irrigation lines.
Idaho sees approximately seven tornadoes a year, said Paul Flatt, a warning coordination meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Boise. "Most of these are quite weak, of course. Most happen in the Magic Valley and the upper portion of the Snake River Plain. In your area they are relatively uncommon."
Flatt explained that in the West tornadoes often appear invisible in the middle. He said typically there is not enough moisture in the air for the portion of a tornado between the ground and a cloud to form a visible shape. A funnel cloud, he said, is actually a tornado that touches down on the ground and churns up debris.
"We're back to business as usual," said O'Crowley, who added that the roof at M&J is now a patchwork of tarps. "We've got the doors fixed so we can lock the place up at night."
A tornado in Carey ripped the roof off the M&J Motor Co. garage last week depositing portions of the building on Main Street and onto the hood of a pickup truck. Although the garage sustained the most damage in town, other property and utilities were damaged and trees were uprooted in the path of a twister that traveled down Main Street to the Blaine County Fairgrounds before it disappeared. Photo by Willy Cook
