A tornado might have uprooted this tree on the 300 block of Route 138 in Clay Township. The damage was caused during Wednesday's storms.

Damage left behind from a storm that swept through Butler County Wednesday appeared to hit Clay Township especially hard.

And from the way trees were twisted and uprooted, Reid Campbell, the township's emergency management coordinator, thinks a tornado was possibly to blame.

“Part of my job is to look at these things and turn (findings) in to the county if I believe there possibly was a tornado,” he said Sunday. “My job is to evaluate and notify the county.”

He thinks he determined the path of what might have been a tornado.

“From the twisting of the trees and the fact that I can track it for probably five miles doing damage at the tree tops,” he said, “it went from Halston Road, one mile outside West Sunbury all the way across Route 8, where we had the closure,” he said.

Downed trees and power lines led fire crews to close a portion of Route 8 between Sunset Drive in Center Township and Route 138 in Clay Township for around eight hours.

The West Sunbury Volunteer Fire Department, where Campbell serves as assistant chief, handled eight or nine calls Wednesday evening through the night for fallen trees and wires.

Butler County's 911 center was deluged with similar calls in much of the county during that same time frame, but apparently not nearly as much as Clay Township.

As part of his emergency management coordinator's role, Campbell compiled his observations and analysis as well as photographs, primarily showing particular damage to trees and structures.

“Trees were uprooted, trees were twisted off,” he said. “If they're twisted, something twisted them.”

He said shingles were also torn off the roof of a garage on Route 8, and a house on Timblin Road also sustained minor roof damage from falling trees.

Campbell passed on his evidence Thursday to Amy Marree, emergency management planner for the county emergency services department. She is to review that information before possibly forwarding it to the National Weather Service in Pittsburgh. Marree was unavailable for comment Monday.

The weather service has not yet received any inquiry about a tornado in Butler County, Lee Hendricks, a meteorologist with the agency, said Monday.

But should it, eventually, the weather service would conduct a storm survey that could include sending out a team of surveyors to conduct its own damage inspection.

“You have to look at and analyze the debris itself,” he said. “A tornado leaves signature marks that you can see.”

For instance, if all of the fallen trees were knocked down in different directions, then it was likely a tornado. But if the downed trees fell in one direction, it was probably a downburst, also known as straight-line winds.

The two weather phenomena are often confused. The main difference is that winds do not rotate in a downburst, Hendricks said.

Damage in a tornado is typically localized and debris is blown all over the place, whereas in straight-line winds the damage typically covers a larger area and debris is generally blown in one direction.

“Twisted trees can happen in either case,” Hendricks said.

Following Wednesday's storms, the weather service was notified of a possible tornado in the borough of S.N.P.J. near the Ohio state line, Hendricks said. An analysis subsequently determined it was a downburst, not tornadic.

But the weather service confirmed that a tornado hit in the Beaver Falls area of Beaver County during the Wednesday night storms.

The tornado was classified as an EF-2, which means it packed peak wind speeds of 120 mph.