Confirmed tornado hits Silverhill area

SILVERHILL, Alabama (WALA) - Folks in Silverhill still have a long ways to go before life gets back to normal. Wednesday, Mother Nature turned violent and put Baldwin County on edge for much of the morning. The preliminary report from the National Weather Service categorizes the tornado as an EF2 tornado but the final call has not yet been made.

An official with the National Weather Service says a tornado did in fact touch down in Silverhill on Wednesday morning.

A team from the NWS surveyed the damage to assess the strength of the tornado.

"I think we've got a fairly good idea that this was a tornado, the path was fairly confined, we have convergence along the path indicative of a tornado. The question is how strong? Right now we've centered on at least 130 mile per hour winds," Jeff Garmon with the National Weather Service said.

The NWS says this was possibly an EF2 tornado, and maybe even higher.

The team will finish surveying the damage on Friday to make a final assessment.

"We do see these occasionally but we haven't seen any this strong in at least five years,” Garmon said.

Crews were hard at work cleaning up. Utility workers fixed power lines and a volunteer crew from the Southern Baptist Convention came to help.

"Anything that has a disaster attached to it, we try to help people," Ken Gibson, a volunteer, said.

University of Mobile professor Steven Carey walked around to see the damage. He took pictures to use in an upcoming lesson.

"We're basically studying exactly what happened today,” said Carey.

They're learning about super storms in the Great Plains.

Powerful winds snapped trees in two, littered yards, and even parked a trailer on top of a roof. But others had it worse.

During the storm, the roof of a home was blown off. The remnants were scattered all throughout the backyard.

When Carey brings back the pictures to show his class, it will certainly be interesting, but this proves that tornados can be fascinating and frightening.

"It makes me ill. It really does. Tornadoes are fascinating, but so are lions and they can eat you,” Carey said.