A very rare EF1 tornado rips through Mercer County community, USA

A rare EF1 tornado touched down in the Spanishburg section of Mercer County on Oct. 8 leaving a path of destruction in its wake. The last time a tornado was reported in Mercer County was in April of 1965.

The 2014 tornado had a track that was 5 and 1/2 miles, meteorologist Phil Hysell with the National Weather Service in Blacksburg, Va., told the Daily Telegraph. Hysell estimated the tornado had winds of up to 105 mph.

The EF tornado scale goes from 0 to 5, with 0 being the weakest and 5 being the strongest. Witnesses reported seeing a funnel cloud near Spanishburg

The tornado struck and destroyed a mobile home in the Spanisburg area and downed several trees.

After the tornado hit, a 4-year-old child was found between a mattress and a box spring in the wreckage of a mobile home that was destroyed by the storm. His mother was located about 80-feet away. Both the child, and his mother, were hospitalized following the storm. Ashley Radford, 30, and her 4-year-old son Tyler, were injured in the storm, their uncle Jerry Wimmer told the Daily Telegraph. The force of the storm carried Tyler 100 feet away from the home and tossed Ashley 85 feet in the other direction.

“God must have been sitting beside them,” Wimmer said. “He had to have been. I’ve never seen anything like this in West Virginia before.”

A second structure in the Spanishburg community also was damaged by the tornado.