Panic in Lemoore after Kelly Slater’s Surf Ranch nearly tagged by a tornado

"The Suck Zone. It's the point basically when the twister... sucks you up."

A wild Tuesday up in California’s surf-rich Central Valley after a tornado nearly took out one of the state’s most consistent righthanders and, I suppose, lefthanders. Yes, Kelly Slater’s fabled Surf Ranch, where celebrities and wealthy folk are coaxed into tubes by the one-and-only Raimana van Bastolear, might have been obliterated after some powerful storms produced ultra-rare twisters mere miles away from the Big Blue Plow.

Nick Daer, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service office in Hanford, received a call from a local in nearby Biola, some handful of miles north of Lemoore, at precisely 2:12 p.m. to report a funnel cloud kissing the earth. Another was reported at 5:16 p.m. touching down even closer.

The Weather Service initially reported that the first tornado lingered on the ground for 10 minutes, possibly trying to sort out which direction Surf Ranch lay. Anyone who has been up that way would understand the confusion, as the flat valley landscape and copycat industrial farm operations make difficult to tell one town from another.

Brian Ochs, a meteorologist at the Weather Service in Hanford, got all technical, declaring, “We can’t officially call it a tornado until we get additional information,” but everyone knows it probably was one.

Tornados are rare, but not unheard of, in California. 487 have been reported since 1950. If it would have found the mark and landed on Surf Ranch, though, it would be the first time a man-made wave pool was brought low by a twister.

Anyhow, that’s that but before you go, do you think the strong storms that produced the tornados are a result of human-induced climate change or not?

Discuss.