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At least two tornadoes have been confirmed in Southwest Virginia from Tuesday’s thunderstorms.
Near Duffield in Scott County, a 30-yard-wide tornado with 100 mph estimated winds traveled slightly more than half a mile, uprooting trees.
In Lee County just north of Pattonsville, a 50-yard-wide tornado with 100 mph winds traveled 1.3 miles, also affecting only trees.
Both tornadoes were rated EF-1 on the 0 to 5 Enhanced Fujita Scale, a tornado intensity scale based on observed damage.
The National Weather Service office in Morristown, Tennessee, also surveyed damage at Pennington Gap in Lee County, where a strip mall was heavily damaged, but found that 2.5-mile-long swath of damage was caused by straight-line winds of 70 to 90 mph rather than a tornado.
Numerous instances of wind damage occurred in areas west of Interstate 77 and in Virginia’s southern rim of counties to the east through Southside as a series of thunderstorms affected the region Tuesday afternoon and evening.
For more on the weather conditions that set up this week’s storms, see Kevin Myatt’s weekly column.