Look, up in the sky. It’s a fire. No, it’s a tornado. Apparently, it can be both.
On Saturday, firefighters working to contain the Deer Creek Fire in southeast Utah witnessed a rare occurrence: the blaze worked with surrounding atmospheric conditions to form Utah’s 10th recorded EF2 tornado, according to Kris Sanders, a meteorologist in the National Weather Service’s office in Grand Junction, Colorado.
Sanders said the fire-induced tornado was approximately 100 yards wide, and, according to meteorologist Gillian Felton, it lasted about 12 minutes.
The tornado’s damage assessment marked a top speed of 122 miles per hour, according to Brittany Whitlam, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service’s Salt Lake City office.
According to Sanders, conditions roughly mimicked those made by thunderstorms that produce tornadoes. The large amount of fuel being burned created a pyrocumulus cloud, as well as intense heat and subsequent updraft, he explained, leading to “a rising column of air.”
The heat and wind being sucked into the fire likely produced the vorticity, or spin, Sanders said, helping the column grow into the tornado seen on a video captured by a firefighter and posted Monday on Facebook by the federal Bureau of Land Management’s Utah office. The video has since gone viral.
“We saw it on the radar, and this column of air was spinning,” he said. It was “fairly deep, like what we see in a thunderstorm.”
Meteorologists were able to rate the tornado because it damaged a nearby single-family home in ways that met the EF2 criteria, nearly destroying its roof, Sanders said. Were a similar storm to happen in a remote area with no homes to damage, he said it would likely be categorized as an EF0.
Though he said fire whirls are seen quite often, the size of this “firenado” made it remarkably more rare. He added that these tornadoes typically happen over intense fires with lots of fuel, so there’s a chance they occur and no one’s around to see or document them.
Since its start on July 10 near Old La Sal in San Juan County, the Deer Creek Fire has grown to 14,760 acres, according to Utah Fire Info’s latest update, and was 7% contained as of Thursday morning.