Winds clocked at over 50 miles per hour by the National Weather Service shifted through Breathitt County last Thursday evening, uprooting some trees and branches in scattered locations - but they didn’t bring much-needed rain to most of us.

Much of the tree damage was done between 8 and 8:30 that night, as a phenonemon called a “Gust Front” pushed through the county and Eastern Kentucky. That brought on scattered reports of tree damage. Two reports of damage were received by the Weather Service from South Jackson and Wolverine.

“I heard a ‘Pop! Pop!’ sound, and heard a tree come down,” said Mike Salyers, whose house on Combs Street in South Jackson received roof damage, in addition to the tree blown down in the front yard by the storm. “After I looked outside at the damage, I thought to myself that I’m glad the tree fell in the yard, instead of the other way, which would have put it on my front porch, or on the front roof. But it’s funny, because we got very, very little rain. I know the wind sure made up for it.”

Salyers told the Voice that later in the evening he fixed the roof on the back of the house, “to keep any rain out that could have come later.” Looking at the situation last Friday morning, he said he had homeowner’s insurance and would work on getting the fallen tree out of the front yard over the weekend. “He was right about that tree falling in the yard, and not on his porch or roof,” added his neighbor across the street, Oran Roberts. “I was gone when the wind hit, but when I came back, I saw the tree had come down. Mike was lucky. That tree could have destroyed his house.”

Another area where some wind damage occured was in the Oakwood Estates area in Wolverine. A tree at the corner of Oakwood and Chestnut Drive was downed by the high winds, as well as numerous branches strewn over the landscape. One neighbor was seen last Friday combining their morning walk with taking a leaf blower to parts of the neighborhood, clearing the streets and sidewalks of the debris.

Earlier in the evening, a severe thunderstorm with gusty winds, frequent lightning and brief heavy rain roared through the northern parts of Breathitt County, prompting Weather Service officials to issue a Severe Thunderstorm Warning around 6:15 p.m. “That storm popped up in central Lee County, and moved slowly east into Northern Breathitt, Southern Wolfe and Eastern Lee Counties,” said Ed Ray, who’s a Meterologist with the National Weather Service’s Jackson Office. “A couple of places got the heavy rain, but by 7 p.m. the storm weakened and moved into Magoffin County.”

But Ray added the second round of winds that downed the trees in Wolverine and South Jackson came from a “Gust Front”. “There was a complex of severe thunderstorms along the Ohio River and Northern Kentucky, moving towards Lexington. Ahead of that, we had that air hitting Eastern Kentucky, where we had record temperatures in the 100’s and dewpoints around 60 degrees, which is very dry for August. The air over us was already pretty dry, and when that storm complex came, you had thunderstorms developing in the upper parts of the atmosphere, well above the ground. Those storms fell in that drier air, and the rain and hail evaporated as a result. The air was cooled, but the wind went down over us in a sudden blast. That’s what happened last Thursday night.”

Ray also mentioned that because the winds were high, they were not above 58 miles per hour, which would have qualified them to be put in the severe weather category. “Instead of doing that, we decided to issue a special weather statement to Breathitt and the counties affected by the winds.”