NWS: Tornado not a 'true water spout'

HAMPTON, Va. (WAVY) - The tornado that ripped through downtown Hampton, Friday night, started on the water and jumped to land according to National Weather Service meteorologist Bill Sammler. Sammler confirms it was one EF1 tornado.

"Anytime you have a tornado in a heavily populated area, there's real concern about not only damage but most especially injury and loss of life," says Sammler.

The good news is emergency crews report no deaths in Hampton because of the tornado, only some minor injuries. Many images sent to WAVY.com by our viewers show what appears to be a water spout over the James River, but Sammler says that is not exactly what viewers saw.

"This was not really a true water spout. This was actually a tornado over water. Typically true water spouts aren't actually accompanied by thunder storms. They're rarely accompanied by anything more than a shower. This was actually a storm that is much more like the storm that produced the Gloucester tornado last year. Water spouts are slow moving and in many cases they're much weaker than a typical tornado."

Sammler says the Hampton tornado was nearly a quarter of a mile wide with winds nearly 100 miles per hour.  As for how far it traveled, Sammler says roughly 3.5 miles on land and water, but he admits after a certain point on water, the National Weather Service stops tracking a tornado.

"How far on the James it was on the water and then if it maintained itself as it went back over onto the Chesapeake Bay, we don't really keep track of that, so it's really impossible to know how long it actually might have been on the ground."