ROCKPORT, Tx — Now that Tropical Storm Alberto has passed, meteorologists with the National Weather Service Corpus Christi office believe at least one tornado touched down in the Rockport area. Several tornado warnings were issued in Aransas County between Wednesday morning and Thursday morning.
On Thursday morning, many neighbors were out cleaning up the damage caused to their properties by strong winds and heavy rainfall. One resident on Farm to Market Road 1781 reported strong winds damaged their carport while another resident on Harbor Drive said a palm tree snapped in half, landing on their fence.
Cory Mottice, Warning Coordination Meteorologist with NWS Corpus Christi spent Thursday morning talking with residents and surveying damage to determine what happened. Mottice says,
"we’re gonna put it all together and get an EF-rating for the tornado to see just how strong it was. You can see a few of these trees if you go back farther here just the top of them are twisted. They had a lot of branches down, but not a lot of significant structural damage."
Working with emergency management coordinators, interviewing homeowners, and physically looking for clues in the damage can detail what exactly happened. Aside from tornado damage, he will also be looking at flooded areas to figure out exactly how impactful the storm surge was in our area. It'll take a of couple days to compile this report, but it seems obvious a tornado is responsible for this damage.
"So it may have briefly touched-down, picked up, and then touched-down again as we got a little farther to the northwest— so potentially two different tornadoes officially, but the same area," Mottice says.
The final report will be published on the NWS Corpus Christi website.
As of late Thursday morning, it released a preliminary report that at least one tornado caused damage in the Rockport-area.
This is a developing story. We'll update this article with new information as soon as it becomes available.