Tornado-like winds spun across northern West Marin Sunday morning, ripping apart a Tomales barn with a rancher inside, snapping telephone poles, and uprooting a dozen large giant eucalyptus trees on Dillon Beach Road.
Water spouts and funnel clouds were reported on and around Tomales Bay. One twisting, 80-mile-per-hour wind apparently jumped inland near Dillon Beach, skirted the town of Tomales, and raced another four miles east to Twin Bridges Road.
No injuries resulted from the storm, but at 10 a.m. retired dairyman Andrew Poncia, 74, whose ranch is just north of Tomales, had a close call.
"I come up to the barn every morning and throw the calves out a little hay. I was sitting right there waiting for the rain to let up," he said, pointing to a spot among the haybales.
Poncia, a Tomales native, said he had never seen a storm so severe, and he thought he was a dead man. "I had a pretty close call, If that roof had come down on the bales, I would have been pinned down under it."
His barn, the size of four buses, lay in shambles Sunday. What remained of the tin roof, which was only five years old, sat like a tent splayed over the field, with haybales still stacked and standing. The barn floor, however, had moved three feet north and walls had been reduced to splinters.
Husband Bill Howson said Anne saw a piece of tin roof about 20-by-20 feet slowly sailing and rotating over to neighbor Lois Parks' yard.
"There was a roaring like a string of semi[trucks] going by," Howson said. "Right away there were people up there helping [Poncia]."
Lois Parks, pointing to a pile of tin in her yard, said the piece of Poncia's roof clipped a stand of eucalyptus trees before landing. In addition, the wind shoved two church pews several feet against Park's fence and damaged her roof too.
A Tomales resident since 1945, Parks recalled another "twister" that devastated chicken houses at her ranch in 1951.
"There were chickens strewn all over the pasture. Dead chickens. We cleaned up chickens all day, " Parks said. That wind, she said, danced up to Two Rock Road and destroyed the old Christiansen house.
Capt. Doug Cole of the Marin Fire Department's Tomales Station said he and firefighters were concerned that a car could have been trapped Sunday beneath a line of uprooted eucalyptus trees at the intersection of Middle and Dillon Beach roads.
"Normally winds take out a couple of trees, but not eight in a row that land in the same direction," Cole said. The branches, according to one rancher, were "twisted and spun around like you'd wring a washcloth."
"It had to be a twister of some kind. The grass was laying down along with the brush straight up the hill toward Tomales," Cole said. Cole said he saw a black funnel cloud - a little spiral coming out of the clouds - moving north from Tomales about half-an-hour after Poncia's barn blew apart.
Later, a tornado-like wind touched down 50 miles away near Napa, slamming a jogger against a fence, and cutting a 20-foot wide, quarter-mile long swathe of destruction, said National Weather Service meteorologist Robert Dias. No tornadoes were reported near Tomales, he said, but there was a small craft advisory warning of rough seas.
It is possible that the Tomales and Napa winds were related, he said.
The sound, however, was "like a freight train going through," he said. Outside, between the oceanside trailer park and the town of Dillon Beach, tables and dumpsters were flipped over and a portable toilet lay a quarter-mile from where it had been.
Tomales rancher Bill Jensen, who Sunday was at a friend's house near Nick's Cove in Marshall, said he saw a waterspout swirl up out of Tomales Bay.
"It got dark and you could hear the thunder. There was a big crack of lightning and a sudden burst of hail," Jensen said. "It was like a big, cold ocean swell, but it started lifting the water up off the bay, like a white churned-up mist about 200-feet high. Then it was a big funnel at least 60-feet across.
Jensen said the spout headed south toward Point Reyes Station and seemed to hit land on the east shore of the bay. Jensen's friend, rancher Dio Choperena, said he saw a second water spout form and move inland - perhaps this one being the one that "touched down at Andy's place."
Jensen said he got back to his Tomales ranch, which is across Highway 1 from the Poncia and Parks ranches, to find a piece of Poncia's barn roof in his pasture.
The piece, he said, had to travel over 250-foot-tall eucalyptus trees to land where it did, about a half-mile from where the roof was supposed to be nailed down.