LA has seen some unusual weather lately, but this was something terrifyingly unfamiliar.
"The thing I remember the most about the 1983 tornado in Los Angeles was what an anomaly it was," said former NBC4 forecaster Fritz Coleman, who had joined the station a year earlier."When the story aired, we thought, 'Wow, this is a historic event.'"
"You need rotation in the atmosphere, and some sort of storm to be able to lift some of that rotation," said NBC4 forecaster David Biggar."We ended up with surface winds that were coming out of the south. But above it, up in the upper atmosphere, we had winds coming out of the west, and that creates this natural rotation through the atmosphere."
It was just before 8 a.m. when the tornado began carving its way through neighborhoods near downtown Los Angeles. A city fire department ambulance team responding to a separate call first reported a funnel-type cloud near 47th Street and Broadway at 7:59 a.m. Reports of wind damage followed. The tornado was classified at the time as an F2, which can produce winds of 113 to 157 mph. And, in Southern California's mild weather, most buildings weren't built to withstand that kind of rotating wind.
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