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VIRGINIA BEACH — Weather was already dominating the conversation at the city’s emergency operations center for the Something in the Water festival Sunday when a tornado began to take shape over the Lynnhaven River just before 6 p.m.
Two meteorologists from the National Weather Service had been embedded in Virginia Beach since Thursday to keep the city abreast of any storm developments during the three-day event. Their eyes were glued to radar data on four computer monitors inside the Virginia Beach Convention Center during the busy weekend.
Severe thunderstorms had forced the festival organizers to delay Sunday’s events. Just before 6 p.m., the forecast took an even sharper turn for the worst — and it led organizers to cancel the last day of festival events.
“We saw the circulation starting to form, starting to show some signs of rotation as it approached Virginia Beach from the south,” said Jeff Orrock, one of the meteorologists who was at the city’s command post. “As it got toward the Kempsville area, it started to tighten up.”
In real time, he shared what he was seeing on the screens with emergency personnel in the room. National Weather Service meteorologists have been doing more than just issuing forecasts and warnings to localities in recent years. They’ve been working alongside officials to provide up-to-the-minute information and to answer questions in person.
During a winter blizzard, the meteorologists set up post in a Richmond command center.
Virginia Beach officials communicate with the weather service before and during all major events and festivals, but they’re not always available to be on site, said Tiffany Russell, city spokesperson.
On Sunday in Virginia Beach, their expertise gave the city a leg up on the tornado response time.
“Because the weather service was with us, we were able to advise city leadership, our operations folks across the city, that it was incoming,” David Topczynski, Virginia Beach’s emergency management coordinator, said at a news conference Monday morning. “We started shifting our task force that was dedicated to the Oceanfront, releasing them to go out to the city.”
At 5:47 p.m., the National Weather Service office in Wakefield issued a tornado warning. Three minutes later, at 5:50 p.m., Orrock and his colleague Sam Wray saw signs of a debris ball on the radar.
“We were able to tell them (city personnel) we had a tornado on the ground,” Orrock said.
At 6:03 p.m., the city made the call and announced the last day of the festival was canceled.
Emergency services started deploying to the impacted area, Topczynski said.
The cyclone was an EF3 tornado, which carries winds between 136 and 165 mph. It was the first of that magnitude on record in Virginia Beach, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It was 400 yards wide, with a 4.5-mile path from the eastern branch of the Lynnhaven River through Joint Expeditionary Base Fort Story.
No one was injured. Between 50 and 100 homes were damaged, with $15 million in residential losses, according to the city. The 2200 block of Haversham Close in Virginia Beach’s Broad Bay Point Greens neighborhood saw the most damage.
[ Related: A tornado ravaged this Virginia Beach couple’s home. Miraculously, their 2 dogs survived. ]
Sunday started out with rain and worsened as the day went on, keeping the weather service meteorologists Wray and Roman Miller busy at the command center. Orrock took over for Miller in the afternoon.
His team had also provided weather information from their Wakefield office during the first Something in the Water festival held in Virginia Beach in 2019. On the first night of the event that year, a thunderstorm with heavy wind and rain caused the performances to be canceled.
“It got so hectic, trying to communicate remotely,” Orrock said.
Some of the benefit of being on site this year was dealing with rain and tide problems in person.
The meteorologists inspected the sand berms the city built next to the shore on the festival’s east perimeter. On Thursday afternoon, 4 to 6-foot breaking waves had started to erode them.
“We had a lot of concerns about the berms,” Orrock said.
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A nor’easter was moving up the coast and wind gusts reached about 35 mph by late Friday night. The berm had to be build back up again on Saturday morning before the festival opened. The weather stayed pleasant throughout Saturday.
But Sunday brought consistent rain and wind, with 50 mph gusts in Sandbridge and the Dam Neck area, a severe thunderstorm capped by the tornado.
On Monday, Orrock and his team, who were still in town, surveyed the destruction.
“These were really well-built homes in a hurricane zone,” he said. “It takes a lot of wind to do so much damage.”
He’s just glad he and his colleagues were in Virginia Beach to assist.
“We were all in the right place at the right time,” Orrock said. “It worked out.”
Stacy Parker, 757-222-5125, stacy.parker@pilotonline.com