Tornado strikes near Dora

DORA - Time moves differently when a tornado is battering your house and property.

Meteorologists said the storm lasted less than half an hour. But for Gordon Fraze, it felt like much longer waiting out weather that ripped down trees, fences and barns, hurtled a cattle feeder across his yard and flipped trailers like a tin can.

"Things were flying around like you wouldn't believe," Fraze told The News on Monday of the tornado that hit his property outside Dora on Sunday night. "You couldn't walk through the yard for all the trees."

It could have been worse, sure. Fraze's house on South Roosevelt Road N held strong through the chaos apart from a few broken windowpanes and some roof damage. There were no injuries but a gash to the leg of his dog Bullet, who was chastened by a blow from flying debris but is expected to recover just fine.

Fraze's was one of two ranch houses with reported damage during a tornado that touched ground between 7:30 and 7:57 p.m. Sunday from two miles southeast of Dora up to eight miles southeast of Arch. It was the last of three tornados that touched down in eastern New Mexico that evening and the worst among them - the first lasted from 4:55 p.m. to 5:52 p.m. around Clayton, and the second from 6:04 p.m. to 6:25 p.m. between 20 miles east of Elkins to one mile southwest of Pep.

A meteorologist with the National Weather Service office in Albuquerque described the supercell Sunday as a "fairly typical severe spring setup," which also brought baseball-sized hail reports in northeast New Mexico's Union County.

"We had the dry line set up over eastern New Mexico with very dry air to the west of that line and moist air coming up from the Gulf of Mexico to the east of that line, and strong winds from the southwest," Randall Hergert told The News. "Typically during the spring you see these things come up on a day-by-day basis, very strong winds that are going to mix up the moisture ahead of the dry line."

No damages or injuries were reported for the first two tornadoes, and a determination as to the wind speeds and classification of the third was still pending a formal survey as of Tuesday afternoon. In southeast Roosevelt County there was a rough estimate of 50 downed power lines from multiple service carriers, according to County Manager Amber Hamilton.

On Monday afternoon, Fraze was still without power - but he was not without help. Friends and family, from church and surrounding communities, were busy on scene with him all day, picking up fallen foliage and sifting through scattered fence segments. Fraze estimates he's out at least $2,500 for the fencing he'll have to replace, and that's not to say anything of the history brought to ruin by the tornado.

"It looked a lot bigger when it was standing," Jared Fraze said of the remains of the century-old building leveled in his father's back yard. Built at the turn of the 20th century, the building formerly functioning as "Longs Church" had been transported a few miles across the land to Fraze's property in the mid-1960s and operated as a hay barn thereafter.

To see it collapsed into a pointed roof on a heap of cluttered timber was difficult, Gordon Fraze said, but for the most part everyone was too occupied Monday in cleanup to meditate much on that loss quite yet.

Among those helping Monday were Fraze's grandchildren and other family friends as young as 6 and 10 years old, pushing wheel barrows and picking up branches while their elders operated the heavy machinery.