LEBANON - A funnel cloud touched down late Friday afternoon at Bob Cate’s home on Tennessee School Road, tearing off sections of roof from his seed and vehicle warehouses and scattering debris half a mile away.

Neighbors gathered to help Cate clean up and to move thousands of pounds of grass seed into a more protected corner of his damaged barn.

It’s the first tornado Cate and his wife, Alene, have experienced in their 58 years in Lebanon.

Cate was outside shortly before 5 p.m. when it started to hail. He went inside and the funnel cloud touched down shortly afterward.

He heard only what sounded like “a big fan,” but his neighbor Dan Roth said the noise was more like a freight train.

“I was in my shop working and I heard it,” Roth said. “I went and looked out the window and I saw a big funnel cloud. ... It looked like a tornado. There was no doubt about it.”

The tornado blew the doors off all the barns and shops on the property and ripped sections of roof from every building but the Cate home.

It also took down four trees on the Cate property and two on the Roth place and left a twisted ribbon of metal inches from the Cate front porch. “What saved the house was those three redwoods,” Cate said, nodding at the trees standing around his home, the historic S.C. Myers House, built in 1888.

Two cedars, a walnut and a fir weren’t so lucky. The uprooted cedars fell on his garage, knocking a few shingles off the home’s roof. The other trees fell in the yard, littering the ground with leaves and snapped branches.

Pacific Power employees spent the evening repairing downed lines on Cate’s property. Officials with the Linn County Road Department surveyed the area and reported a debris path from Tennessee School Road over neighboring KGAL Drive.

Roth and other neighbors talked about the storm as they removed the damaged, 15-foot corrugated metal doors from the Cate seed warehouse and fired up a John Deere loader to push some 150,000 pounds of fescue seed away from the open roof.

Gary Crossan saw the cloud from about two miles away.

“We could see that thing just swirling,” he said. “You could see it develop a little funnel, go back up ... all of a sudden it looked like it went through a burnt field, because it all went black.”

“It went down, picked up a bunch of stuff and just started throwing it everywhere,” said Mike Hayes, another neighbor about two miles away. “Crazy. Totally crazy.”

“It was just amazing,” Roth said. “I can understand why people in the Midwest head for the basement.”

No one officially recorded Lebanon’s tornado Friday, but conditions were perfect for one to occur.

David Elson, a meteorologist with the Portland office of the National Weather Service, said radar data indicated thunderstorms and a rotating storm pattern.

Funnel clouds are likely in the mid-valley during a “cold core low,” an upper-atmosphere phenomenon in which a low-pressure storm moves over the area with very cold air near its center. The clouds become tornados if they touch the ground.

State Climatologist George Taylor wasn’t surprised that a tornado formed. “With the cold low over us, we were speculating today there might be funnel clouds,” he said.

Meteorologists calculate a tornado’s wind speed from the damage it causes. About Friday’s, Elson guessed in the neighborhood of 75 miles per hour.

“That’s a shot in the dark,” he said.

Thunderstorms in the mid-valley were expected to end Friday night and no hazardous weather — unless rain counts — is predicted for the next few days. Temperatures are expected to be in the low to mid 60s with showers likely most of next week.

By Jennifer Moody, Albany Democrat-Herald