Twister seen near Libby likely a dust devil, meteorologist says

Friday afternoon was clear and sunny in Libby when Tim Ekstedt called The Western News at 3:30 p.m. to report seeing a tornado on his Champion Haul Road property.

“I saw the wind circling, it picked up hay and tossed it around,” Ekstedt said. “It pulled two sheets of plywood from the shop and set them down in the field next door and it picked up a pile of tin sitting beside my shop and tossed it around too. I’ve got tin scattered everywhere.”

A resident at the same property since 1990, Ekstedt said he saw similar weather behavior once before during a summer. That time it “tipped the roof off the woodshed.”

A meteorologist named Travis from the National Weather Service in Missoula said he could not see any cloud over the Libby area on his weather map, and that Ekstedt probably had seen a “dust devil.”

“Tornadoes are connected to cloud, they come from above, while a dust devil builds from the ground,” Travis explained. “Intense heat on the surface eventually leads to an updraft of hot air, and if it is caught by a little gust of wind, it will start rotating.”

If it was indeed a dust devil, that would explain why Ekstedt has only experienced them in summer.

Ekstedt said he would wait until the sun was a little lower in the sky to go and pick up all the scattered tin on his property.