Tornado tears into Oakfield Unusually high winds uproot trees, flip car

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OAKFIELD – It was like a noise she had never heard before.

“It made a noise, not like a growl, but a roar,” Francis Loiacono of New York said, describing the tornado that passed through Oakfield between 9:30 and 10 p.m. Tuesday, uprooting trees and flipping over a car.

Loiacono had just returned to her camp on the south shore of Spaulding Lake after attending a concert at the Oakfield Community Center with members of her family.

“We had four trees come down [on the camp,] thump, thump, thump, thump,” she recalled.

“It was the strangest thing,” Loiacono said as she videotaped a crew cutting up the trees on her camp roof Wednesday afternoon. “Each of the doors in the camp slammed shut one after the other, and I could see all my curtains and drapes just suck in.”

To her surprise, the camp had only minor damage, she said.

The situation was the same at other camps in the area, where trees seemed to have been dropped like wooden matches in every direction, yet few of them actually struck buildings. When they did, damage was usually minimal.

Jenefine Stevens, who lives on the Moro Line Road in Merrill, went through a similar experience about 20 minutes earlier.

“It was something else,” said Stevens, who lives in a mobile home. “I had my little granddaughter with me, and I was scared to death.”

The tornado cut a swath of bent and broken trees across Stevens’ property, ripped up her metal garage and carried it about 100 feet into the woods behind her home.

“That was quite a wind to lay that garage over there,” she said while surveying the damage Wednesday morning with her granddaughter Jenah Carver, 2, of Patten.

Stevens said she was surprised that her trailer didn’t tip over when the storm roared up shortly before 9:30 p.m.

“When I went to put down the back window, I thought it was going to pull me through the window,” she said of the intense wind.

Her car, which was in the garage, had only minor damage. A few items – a wooden snowshoe and an air mattress pump among them – were strewn about the yard, but most things stayed where they had been in the garage.

Officials at the National Weather Service Forecasting Center in Caribou confirmed Wednesday that an F1 tornado had passed through the Oakfield area Tuesday night.

Tornadoes are ranked F0 to F5 on the Fujita scale, depending on their level of power. A tornado of F3 strength can cause significant damage.

According to a public information statement issued by the NWS, the tornado had winds between 73 and 112 miles an hour. It was 50 to 75 yards in width and had a 10-mile southeasterly track beginning in Merrill and ending just south of Timoney Mountain in Oakfield.

Mark Turner, NWS data acquisition program manager, said Wednesday that since 1950, when records were first kept, there have been 92 recorded tornadoes in Maine, among them 10 in Aroostook County, including the one on Tuesday.

Only one person has been killed in the state by a tornado during the 50-year period. Eighteen people have been injured, Turner said. Total property damage for that period was $9.43 million.

Tuesday’s tornado struck Oakfield at about 9:30 p.m. not long after an estimated 100 people had left the Oakfield Community Center after having attended a concert. There were only a few people in the building closing up when the storm hit.

Linda Slauenwhite of Oakfield was one of them. She recalled the heavy rain and strong wind.

“It sounded like severe hail,” she said of the sound the rain made on the metal building.

“You could see and sort of feel the walls and ceiling moving in and out like an accordion,” she said during a telephone interview Wednesday. “Our ears just popped.”

The doors to the building blew open and there was a bright flash of light, then the electricity went off, she said.

Slauenwhite got a bigger surprise when she went outside after the storm subsided. Her 1998 Chevrolet Lumina was gone.

She found it about 50 feet away near the Country Plaza. It was on its roof, the lights were on and the engine was running, but Slauenwhite said she hadn’t started the car before she went outside.

A waitress at a restaurant next door in the Country Plaza told Slauenwhite that she had seen the car flip over and over, get picked up, and come down near two other cars in which teen-agers were sitting.

“That car is just demolished,” Slauenwhite said of her vehicle.

A girl in one of the cars suffered a minor injury.

Shingles were blown off the plaza roof, a laundry door was blown in and two large trees outside were uprooted.

Maine State Police Trooper Anita Levesque was in Houlton when she was dispatched to Oakfield for what initially had been reported as a rollover car accident.

“It was raining so hard I couldn’t see the road,” she recalled Wednesday.

The Houlton Ambulance and Fire Department rescue team also were dispatched to the area at 9:42 p.m. for a reported accident.

Levesque said the cars with the teen-agers were parked next to each other. The windows blew out of one, and one car was blown into the other. Slauenwhite’s car was blown over the cars of the teen-agers before it came to rest on its roof not far away.

She said three or four cars were demolished while two others were damaged.

The trooper said it was lucky that most of the people already had left from the concert. Had they been in the parking lot when the tornado hit, there could have been serious injuries, she said.

From the community center, the tornado crossed Interstate 95 and proceeded toward Spaulding Lake, where it ripped up, knocked over and snapped off dozens of trees.

The Rev. James Flye was at his camp on the lake when the tornado struck at about 9:45 p.m.

“It was very confusing because things were happening all around, and trees were falling,” he recalled Wednesday as he walked to other camps to survey the damage.

“It only lasted a minute or two,” he said. “Then it became deathly quiet, and the stars came out.”