Medina dispatcher comes face-to-face with funnel clouds

MEDINA, Ohio - It was a very long day Wednesday for Rob Harvey. The Medina County Sheriff's dispatcher spent most of the afternoon fielding calls from shaken county residents as severe storms rolled through the area.

The first storm arrived just after 2:30 p.m. It dumped heavy rain across Lorain and Medina counties as it moved southeast.

"The phone didn't stop ringing," Harvey said. "Several lightning strikes started pole fires. One lightning strike even caught a tree on fire."

But that wasn't the end of the severe weather. The second storm took an almost identical track across Lorain and Medina Counties. It moved in just after 4 p.m., producing heavy rain, lightning, and damaging winds. The damage reports started rolling in to Rob's dispatch center minutes later.

"We were slammed," he said. "We had reports of trees on cars with the driver trapped inside. Trees on houses. Trees down in the middle of the road. It was crazy."

That second storm was the biggest and most severe storm of the day. It formed near Sandusky and moved southeast over Oberlin, Litchfield, Seville and Canton. That's where the majority of wind damage occurred. It finally faded away in Carroll County, over 120 miles southeast from where it began near the shores of Lake Erie.

"Glad that's over," Rob said as his shift ended at 6 p.m. and, after a very long day, he was looking forward to a quiet ride home. That's when he came face to face with another thunderstorm.

"I had my sunglasses on, driving up Route 57, that's when I saw it."

Rob did not know that a third storm had formed over Oberlin, several miles northwest of Medina. It was moving his way. A dark, ominous cloud had lowered toward the ground from this latest thunderstorm as it traveled over Litchfield. As a sheriff's dispatcher, Rob's training told him something wasn't right. He checked his watch. It was 6:10 p.m.

"I kinda thought it was a funnel cloud coming down."

What Rob saw was the beginnings of a tornado. A wall cloud was lowering from this rapidly spinning thunderstorm. Wall clouds are just that: the lowering of a portion of the thunderstorm cloud base. This marks where the storm is spinning the fastest. This is where tornadoes or funnel clouds often originate.

Rob grabbed his cell phone camera and took a few shots.

"I saw two small funnels come out of the bottom of the wall cloud. They were like fingers reaching down toward the ground," he said. Rob held his breath. "After about 10 minutes, the fingers lifted back up and the storm faded away quickly."

The area had been spared from even more severe weather damage.