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Tornado hits Pierce County

PIERCE COUNTY, Wash. — A tornado touched down in Pierce County around 7:20 a.m. on Monday, damaging homes and businesses in its path.
Only on KIRO 7, a viewer caught video on her home security cameras of the tornado rushing through her Puyallup neighborhood.
It shows the tornado winds tossing leaves and branches, shaking a trailer, and knocking over a flag pole.
"My husband buried that flag pole probably about four feet down in concrete and it just pushed it down like a noodle," Jennifer Hansen said.
"I just heard like rumbling, it was tremendous rumbling," Allen Hursh said.
He was inside his home when he heard the tornado roar toward his house. It threw a tree onto his roof.
"I thought, 'This is bad,'" he said, gesturing to the tree branch sticking through his ceiling. "This is not good. You can't have a branch sticking through the roof of your house."
The strength of the tornado was evident in how it splintered a tree trunk in his front yard.
It swept through the industrial area around Frederickson, ripping the tarp off the roof of a building and shooting the metal door inwards.
"The door kicked in, the top blew off, and the door was kind of like a kite right above our heads," Matt Delp said.
Delp showed KIRO 7 the giant aluminum door, now cut into pieces.
Only thin cables held it back from shooting toward him and nearly 50 other employees at EnCon concrete company.
"That door would have gone flying down the line and could have hurt a lot of people," he said.
The tornado knocked over rail cars on the Boeing property, blew out the windows of about a dozen cars there and tore a hole through the roof at Northwest Door.
Hursh said it hasn't all sunk in yet.
"I'm still numb," he said. "I'm still 100 percent numb. This is crazy."

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