An EF-2 tornado hit a family farm in the northeast corner of Union County, the National Weather Service confirmed late Tuesday.
Two other areas where severe weather damage was reported were found to only have experienced straight line winds during thunderstorms on Sunday, June 18, said Aaron Davis, a meteorologist at the Shreveport NWS office.
"After events like this, we get a multitude of damage reports in. One of the jobs of the survey team is, they go determine if it was straight line wind damage or a tornado," Davis explained.
The area hit by a tornado included Dorothy and Bob Poole's poultry farm on New London Road. Evidence gathered there helped NWS surveyors determine that it was an EF-2 tornado that hit the county.
"There was a location in northeast Union County that housed a bunch of chicken coops. Now, the chicken coops themselves aren't the best-made structures under the sun, but what they found was that they were completely destroyed," Davis said. "It's almost like the chicken coops were taken, folded up into a ball and tossed across the field. It was very hefty damage."
Wind speeds likely reached about 115 miles per hour, putting it on the lower end of the EF-2 rating. Tornadoes are classified on the Enhanced Fujita (EF) Scale, which classifies them based on wind speed and related damage. Davis explained that surveyors gather evidence of damage indicators when investigating a tornado to determine its rating.
"As the survey science has grown, there are all sorts of countless, high-dollar engineering studies that say you will find this type of damage associated with these wind speeds," he said. "So if you're finding xyz, those usually occur between 110-120 miles per hour... It's a very hands-on, scientifically-backed survey method."
Davis said an area southwest of El Dorado, and another in Dubach, Louisiana were additionally found to have straight line wind damage as a result of the storm, meaning that strong winds may have accompanied thunderstorms in those areas, but no tornadic rotation was evident.
Surveyors from the Jackson, Mississippi NWS officer were also due to search for evidence of a tornado in Ashley County on Tuesday. Davis said only straight line wind damage had been logged by surveyors there.
"I'm only seeing straight line wind damage in here now. I don't see any tornado points out of the county and into Ashley County there," he said. "It's possibly – because there were a lot of tornadoes closer to Jackson proper --... that there's still some surveying to be done there."
On Tuesday, Hamburg residents were still totally without power due to damage sustained by nine transmission structures in the Ashley County area. Power had mostly been restored there and in Crossett by Wednesday afternoon, with approximately 500 Crossett customers and 200 Hamburg customers sill without power as of 4 p.m. Wednesday.