(CNN) At least one person was injured after a rarity Cyclone It hit a town southeast of Los Angeles on Wednesday, local officials said.
The National Weather Service confirmed that the tornado “briefly touched down” in an industrial park and warehouse district in downtown Montebello and rated the tornado an EF-1 with peak winds of 110 mph, the strongest tornado to hit the Los Angeles area. Since 1983.
The “severe microcell” damaged at least 17 buildings, 11 so severely that the fire department deemed them too dangerous to use, according to city public information officer Michael See.
“There was flying debris and all!!!!” He tweeted that Someone shared a video of the storm. The video zooms in on dark gray clouds consuming the sky and heading towards land.
The reported injury is considered minor, Seay told a news conference.
The tornado collapsed a building’s roof, snapped a power pole, toppled an HVAC unit from the top of the building, broke skylights, damaged cars and uprooted a healthy pine tree with a 1-foot-wide trunk, the weather service said after assessing the storm. Damage to Montebello Wednesday.
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, tornadoes are rare in California. Most of the cyclones in the state are small and short-lived.
They are commonly referred to as landmasses (like the water table, but above land). These differ from traditional tornadoes formed by rotating thunderstorms, such as are common in the Central Plains and Southeast. Although landslides can cause damage, it is usually not extensive or severe.
A weak tornado struck a mobile home park in Carpinteria, a coastal city northwest of Los Angeles, on Tuesday evening, the weather service confirmed Wednesday. The service rated it an EF-0, with winds up to 75 mph.
The tornado damaged 25 mobile home units in the Sandpiper Village mobile home park and damaged small trees in a nearby cemetery.
Additional video of the Montebello storm shows a swirling cloud of black debris as roofs are blown off nearby buildings. Vehicles are seen damaged and windows broken.
“The roof just fell off this building,” says one witness, recording a parking lot full of damaged vehicles.
“This is the stuff you see in Ohio, Arkansas…not Montebello,” another witness is heard saying.
Wednesday’s severe weather comes as California has suffered the least in recent months 12 atmospheric rivers They have brought devastating floods and hurricane-force winds. An atmospheric river is like a fire hose, which carries saturated air from the tropics to high latitudes, dumping incessant rain or snow.
At least five people died as storms lashed cities in the San Francisco Bay Area on Tuesday, toppling trees and power lines. The city of San Francisco said its 911 call center had four times its normal call volume during the storm’s peak, resulting in more than 700 downed trees and limbs and glass and debris falling from tall towers.
CNN meteorologist Robert Shackelford and CNN’s Jillian Sykes contributed to this report.
