The thunderclap at about 1 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day was so loud, Marita Doyle, who was looking for something in a closet next to furnace room in her home in West Point, Phippsburg, thought the oil burner had blown up. Up the road, Diana Stevens, who also missed seeing the huge bolt of lightning that preceded the thunder, called her next-door neighbor and asked, “Did something explode?”
Neither they, nor any other resident of the lower Phippsburg peninsula could know that the thunder preceded a weather event beyond anything they might have envisioned for their town — a tornado.
Not far from Head Beach on Hermit Island, Dr. Paul Trotter was carving the turkey, and his wife Anne was making gravy. No one in the family was paying particular attention to the weather, which had already offered a wild assortment of rain, sleet and hail, when suddenly, Dr. Trotter recalls, a ferocious wind came up, bent trees over around the garage and disappeared as quickly as it had appeared. “It sounded like we were inside a jet engine,” he says, “but in five seconds it was over.”
The event was so quick, the Trotters were astounded to discover that all of the trees that had provided a buffer between them and their nearest neighbor were down. They later found that approximately 200 trees had been uprooted or snapped off near their home, and a small outbuilding had been lifted up and set back down on its foundation. “It wasn’t moved from the foundation,” Paul Trotter says, “but it’s no longer level.”
They were fortunate. Nearby, two homes in a colony of small summer cottages were moved off their foundations and several others on the point lost roof shingles or had broken windows.
Although the tornado didn’t linger in Small Point — it was confirmed to be a tornado by John Jensenius of the National Weather Service in Gray, with winds of 100 mph — it wasn’t finished with Phippsburg. It lifted, traveled up The Branch, came down briefly to snap a few trees at the northern end of Hermit Island, and set out across Totman Cove towards the peninsula where the village of West Point is located. As it crossed the water, it picked up moisture, forming a large waterspout that caught the attention of Robin and David Robinson and their family, who were standing at their window overlooking the cove. They had been watching the unusual behavior of a pair of eagles that frequents the area. “They were behaving so differently from normal,” Robin Robinson said, “careening and tumbling and being blown around in an unprecedented way. I had grabbed my camera to get some pictures.”
Just about that time, her son said, “Look at that over there! It looks exactly the way I’ve seen a tornado form on TV.”
Robin Robinson focused her camera on the waterspout, shooting madly. Looking back, she says, “My daughter had the only normal reaction of anyone in the room. This thing was headed straight for us, and her idea was to run.”
The waterspout angled across the cove and disappeared from view. The Robinsons thought it had dissipated, but instead, it jumped over the eastern part of the West Point peninsula and dropped into an area around a small cemetery off Holland Drive. Later, they learned it had knocked over several trees in and near the cemetery.
No one was aware of the havoc the storm was wreaking at the cemetery, but when the twister emerged in the pasture near Robert Stevens’ home, he and his wife, Meg, were looking out and saw it coming. They had heard the thunder about 15 minutes earlier and now watched as trees started to bend, snap and uproot in all directions, and a cloudy formation still filled with lots of moisture whirled towards their house. (According to Jensenius, a tornado is distinguished from a microburst by this erratic pattern. It hops up and down, and in its spinning, knocks down trees in many directions, while a microburst travels in a straight line.)
“We couldn’t believe it was a tornado,” says Meg Stevens. They watched as it tore off part of a metal roof on an outbuilding, leveled two huge trees, broke off several others and moved closer to the house. “We were about to head for the basement,” she says, “when it took a 90-degree turn towards the horse barn. It missed the barn, but took down another tree and demolished a 25-foot canvas building. It twisted the metal frame into a pretzel and shredded the canvas.”
The tornado disappeared into the woods, knocking down a considerable number of trees, and bid farewell to Phippsburg with a swat at John Totman, Sr.’s house on Sebasco Road, where it tangled electrical wires outside his home, blew the transformer and removed the cover of his hot tub with a loud noise. Totman drove down to Sebasco Harbor and was amazed to see that “the water looked like it was standing on end. The waves were standing straight up and down,” he says. “I never saw anything like it.”
Jensenius said a second tornado, with 75-mph winds, landed on Mere Point in Brunswick at about 1:20 p.m. on the same day It damaged some trees and transported part of a canvas motor home cover from the east side of the peninsula to a tree on the west side. Maine normally confirms two tornadoes a year. In 2005, there were three, the third at North Twin Lake in Penobscot County on Aug. 1.