Tornado in Iowa County causes some damage near Williamsburg

It was narrow. It came through fast. And nobody expected it.

Kim Doehrmann said she wasn't at home in rural Williamsburg when the tornado swept through Iowa County Tuesday night, she was south at the Coral Ridge

Mall. Besides the presence of dark clouds to the north, she had assumed it was an ordinary storm.

Then she heard about the tornado taking out half of their barn.

'It totally came out of nowhere,' Doehrmann said.

The barn, it turned out, was only partially damaged by the tornado that had arrived at around 5:50 p.m., but she only found that out after driving back through pouring rain in Oxford.

The storm was so localized that by the time she returned home, the sun was out.

She said a neighboring farm to the south wasn't so lucky, as she said the tornado smashed through a shed containing various equipment 'it's just flat, it's gone,' uprooted trees, and damaged the house. She said there were as many as 60 local Williamsburg residents, neighbors and acquaintances, on site to help pick the pieces.

Still, she was aware that the tornado was narrow enough that it missed several more houses that could have been in its way.

'It missed a lot, we're grateful,' she said.

Tim Gross, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in the Quad Cities, said that exact damage numbers and the path of the storm will be determined tomorrow, but it had been confirmed that the storm was first spotted 3 miles northeast of Conroy, just south of the Amana Colonies.

Gross said the storm developed quickly because the unstable atmosphere had been capped throughout the day by a layer of warm air. Once that cap was overcome by the instability of the environment, the storm was unleashed. Within 10 minutes of becoming aware of the storm's development it had already developed into a super cell, a storm with warm air updraft characterized by its rotation. Gross said all indication was that the tornado that had touched down in Iowa County had receded back into the main cloud before it reached Johnson County. Despite the tornado receding, some areas of Johnson County were visited by storms with wind speeds of up to 40 mph.

Gross said that conditions capable of producing a similar storm will remain through Wednesday night.