Weak Florida Tornadoes This Week Created Dramatic Footage

A thankfully weak tornado striking a high-rise building in downtown
Fort Lauderdale, Florida on Tuesday. Luckily, damage was relatively
minor and no serious injuries were reported. 

As the nation gears up for a massive storm with wind, fires, blizzards, tornadoes, ice, severe weather and general misery over the next couple of days another smaller system produced some drama in Florida earlier this week.

A couple of weak tornadoes touched down around Fort Lauderdale, Florida Tuesday.

Weak tornadoes aren't usually all that newsworthy, but these two touched down in downtown Fort Lauderdale, and at the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport.

So, these got a lot of attention.

In the end, the tornadoes didn't cause a huge amount of damage, because they were weak - both EF-0s, which is the weakest in a scale that goes from zero to five, with five being catastrophic. Damage in the Fort Lauderdale tornadoes was pretty light. Some roofs and trees had problems, that's about it.

Both tornadoes had a path of about three miles. The one downtown had peak winds of 65 mph and the one at the airport got up to 84 mph. 

As I said, though, I'm sure these scared a lot of people, given that lots of people were downtown, or in airport terminals and on planes, awaiting takeoff.

So here are a couple of dramatic videos. Thank goodness things didn't get deadly. Unfortunately, expect worse from the big storm hitting much of the U.S. Friday through Monday.

Here's the tornado in downtown Fort Lauderdale.



And here's the view from the terminal at the airport at the weak tornado, before airport officials wisely chased people away from the windows. At least this wasn't as bad as the tornado that hit the St. Louis, Missouri airport in 2011: