Tornadoes in Gainesville Florida

Answer 1

I have been living in Gainesville for thirteen years and tornadoes don't come through Gainesville much. There occasionally are a few tornado watches at the schools, but tornadoes never strike. If there is a tornado nearby, it will just get a little stormy.

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You need to look up May 4th, 1978 in the Gainesville Sun fische archives at the Alachua County Library's main branch, downtown. (Google archives unfortunately do not carry Sun articles for that day.) That is a day when a number of tornadoes buzzed through the county, one starting early at 6:15am in the morning before sunrise, causing much damage. I was living here when that happened, and I remember that you couldn't drive much around town without witnessing something pretty incredible here and there - trees on cars, trees on homes, trees across power lines, and one place along NW 8th Ave, somewhere west of NW 34th St, where a tornado buzzed off the tops of trees as if some giant electric hair trimmer had been run through the forest.

For some reason, Gainesville (knock on wood) has found itself relatively lucky when it comes to tornadoes. It just hasn't experienced that many. But when it does it HAS experienced days of great damage, such as on February 2 of 1983, when a tornado ripped through town causing 1.5 million dollars in damage.