NORTHUMBERLAND — An EF1 tornado with wind speeds topping 110 mph touched down in Winfield and traveled across the West Branch of the Susquehanna River into Point Township on Monday, the National Weather Service confirmed Tuesday.

The 5:35 p.m. twister — possibly the strongest to hit the Valley in 26 years — lasted only about five minutes as it traveled a three-mile path — leaving a football-field-wide path of destruction — starting on a ridge in Union County and ending on a mountain in Northumberland County, the weather service said.

Those on both sides of the river said there was no doubt it was a twister as they spent the better part of the day cutting up trees and cleaning up pieces of concrete, glass and wood.

John Kohl, of Kohl’s Market on Route 147, said he found pieces of cinder block from a flattened two-story barn behind his neighbor’s house across the street. The debris was scattered around the pasture he owns up on the mountain behind his house.

“A wind storm just doesn’t do that,” he said. “There has to be suction to lift that up.”

Richard Grumm, science operations officer for the National Weather Service in State College, and a team of meteorologists toured the path of destruction with emergency management officials from Union and Northumberland counties and the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency.

Grumm was amazed at the amount of destruction, particularly behind the house of David Englehart, where the two-story barn had been standing.

“Clearly this was a really damaging storm,” Grumm said. “There’s a focused line of damage.”

Grumm and his team took photographs and measurements while inspecting the damage. That information is compiled and compared against data in a manual the weather service uses to determine wind speeds and whether a storm produced a tornado.

The manual includes details such as how fast wind has to be going to snap trees or demolish buildings, he said.

That information is translated into the Enhanced Fujita Scale, which ranks twisters on a scale of 1 to 5, depending on wind speed.

Monday’s tornado was almost an EF2, which has wind speeds between 111 and 135 mph, according to a news release from the weather service.

At this point, there is no damage estimate, said Steve Reiner, director of Northumberland County Department of Public Safety. He said that figure could be available later this week, once property owners get estimates from contractors.

“There are one or two properties that could perhaps be a total loss,” he said.

“A little thump”

The tornado appears to have started in the Gilead Mountain Estates area to the west of Route 15, north of Winfield. Several trees were splintered near the end of Groover Drive, on the ridge.

From there, looking east, it was easy to spot the tornado’s path.

Earle Cornelius, of 43 Riverbreeze Drive, was in his home with his wife, Barb, at the bottom of the ridge, near the river, when the storm hit.

Barb saw a tree limb go past the house.

“Then we heard a little thump,” Earle said, tongue in cheek.

Tuesday, workers were cutting up two large pine trees that fell on top of an enclosed porch on the Cornelius home. Scattered around the property and that of his neighbors, between 50 and 60 trees were split or uprooted.

“It was a hard rain, then it stopped,” he said. “Then the wind came. I didn’t think it was that hard.

“I guess it was hard enough.”

“The best we can”

Across the Susquehanna River, the damage was more severe.

It started in a small RV park at the end of Ferry Road in Point Township. There, bark had been ripped off the trees, exposing how the wind literally twisted the trunks like twine.

At least one small, unoccupied camper was flipped and a large tree crashed through the roof of a small pavilion.

A small rowboat sat in a farm field beyond the campground, as though it were adrift in a sea of mud and harvested corn stalks.

Across the Norfolk Southern rail tracks were more trees with their limbs snapped off, where Englehart said Monday he saw a funnel cloud.

The storm blew near the home of Krystal and Jason Boop, who live down the hill from Englehart.

The master bedroom wall of the home was rolled out 3 or 4 feet. The chimney was blown off, as were shingles on the west side of the roof and the siding on the south side of the house.

Inside, the pressure popped the nails out of the drywall in the kitchen on the north side of the house.

It is not clear whether the house — or any others in the area — would be condemned. Steve Jeffery, in charge of operations for Northumberland County Department of Public Safety, said it would be up to the insurance adjuster, or the Point Township code enforcement officer.

Boop and his family weren’t home at the time of the storm and were put up in a hotel Monday by the Red Cross.

The family is getting along “the best we can,” Boop said. “That’s all you can do.”

Little sleep

Across Route 147, Kohl was getting help from dozens of friends and family to remove the toppled trees around his house.

Meanwhile, his wife, Judy, recounted for Grumm and National Weather Service officials how she and her grandson had very little time to make it to an interior closet in the house before the storm hit.

But she said she relied on the Weather Channel for her warnings.

John Kohl said he got only a few hours sleep before going back to work on his home. Friends, who are contractors, repaired the roof on his addition as other friends used chain saws to cut up the four trees littering the yard.

Next door, his son and others were doing much the same.

The family walked up its dirt farm lane into the pasture and discovered hundreds more downed trees and debris.

“We’ll have to walk the hay fields before we can cut the hay,” Kohl said.

— Email comments to jdeinlein@dailyitem.com