Weak tornado in Mount Laurel overturns parked car but causes no injuries

A weak tornado overturned a parked car Saturday afternoon in Mount Laurel Township, Burlington County, authorities said. No injuries were reported.

The National Weather Service in Mount Holly said the maximum 70-mph twister touched down at 2:07 p.m. in a commercial warehouse parking lot. Surveillance video showed it moving across the lot and overturning a car. It then passed over the warehouse building, causing minor roof damage. Two air-conditioning units were torn off the roof. Ceiling tiles were dislodged throughout the interior of the building. The tornado then quickly dissipated.

“It touched down in the parking lot of the building, flipped the car and moved over the building, then dissipated when it was over the building. It was very brief,” meteorologist Alex Staarmann of the weather service office in Mount Holly said of the twister at Mount Laurel Industrial Plaza, off Gaither Drive.

“Initially, I thought it was a hailstorm, then the ceiling tiles started to lift up and something big was coming through. It was like a freight train,” Robert Deal, service manager at Castle Windows in the plaza, told the Burlington County Times. Twenty-five to 30 people in the building were evacuated, Deal said. The gas was shut off as a precaution, authorities said.

The weather service categorized it as a landspout tornado, meaning one with a narrow, rope-like condensation funnel that forms while a thunderstorm cloud is still growing and there is no rotating updraft; the spinning motion originates near the ground.