Tornado touches down in Celina, Celina Record

EF-0 tornado touches down in Celina Lisa Ferguson, lferguson@starlocalmedia.com Apr 29, 2016 A small tornado touched down Friday afternoon in Celina and heavily damaged a local event venue while scattering debris onto nearby properties and causing power outages throughout the area. No injuries were reported. The National Weather Service forecast office in Fort Worth sent a crew to the scene Saturday and confirmed that an EF-0 tornado had struck the area. A tornado of that size is the lowest on the Enhanced Fujita scale, by which tornadoes are measured, and is characterized by winds between 65-75 mph, according to Matt Bishop, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Fort Worth. The Celina Fire Department was dispatched after 4:30 p.m. Friday to The Venue at Waterstone, at 10455 County Road 133. Captain Shawn McCarty said his crew was met by the owners of the barn-like structure, which sustained significant damage as a result of the tornado. Firefighters conducted a search of the building, which is known throughout Celina as “the wedding barn,” and cleared it after finding no one inside. Roads surrounding the property were closed for some time following the tornado as utility crews tended to downed power lines, which left the immediate area and several other Celina neighborhoods without power for several hours. Utility workers removed a large, twisted piece of The Venue at Waterstone’s metal roof that had been dangling from power lines adjacent to the property. Much of the 8,600-square-foot structure’s roof was ripped from the building and deposited in mangled sheets on the picturesque property on which it sits, as well as on neighboring properties. Owner Lyle Wise said he had been in the building about 20 minutes before the tornado occurred, prepping it for a wedding that was scheduled to take place there Saturday. Following the tornado, daylight streamed through holes in the ceiling as rainwater dripped down around tables that had already been set with silverware and flower centerpieces. Puddles filled the area that was to have served as the wedding aisle. Soon after the tornado struck, Wise said he wasn’t sure whether the wedding would be able to proceed. “They may use the grounds outside. It just depends on what [the weather] does from this point on,” he said. Wise said he and his wife, Nena, watched the tornado build from their home on the opposite end of the property. Once it developed, he said, it began pulling up water from a lake on the property before it slammed into the building. “It just looked like a real dirty cloud with all kinds of debris” in it, he said. “It was crazy. It’s the first one I’ve ever seen.” The wind “just peeled the top portion of the roof off and sent debris (flying) like crazy,” Wise said. “Those (roof) panels are real thick, so it was like throwing razor blades everywhere.” One of the metal sheets traveled east across a road and lodged in the roof of a residence belonging to Larry and Linda Warner, who were inside the home at the time. Firefighters entered the house, McCarty said, and helped move furniture to prevent it from being damaged by rainwater that potentially could have entered through the hole in the roof. “It’s bad, but we’ve seen worse,” said Larry Warner, noting that he and his wife nearly lost their former home in Orange when it was damaged by Hurricane Rita in 2005. Shortly after the tornado, Nena Wise was counting her blessings. “Thank goodness for insurance, and thank goodness it didn’t hit our house,” she said. “This can be replaced,” the Celina native said while standing in the damaged barn. The venue is set to host about 30 weddings in coming months. “So we’ll be scrambling, but it’ll be back.”