Extreme winds send debris flying through Las Cruces neighborhood

Extreme winds crushed a car, uprooted trees and flipped a trampoline in south-central Las Cruces.

“It was like a big gust of wind and then a boom!” recalled Barbara Frank. “I thought I was back in Wisconsin. Tornado weather.”

“I don’t know if it was a tornado or a microburst,” said Michael Ybarra, who was outside with his family. “It just came real quick. Told my kids to run inside.”

It happened just after 5:30 p.m. on Mother’s Day.

The damage appeared to be limited to an area less than a third of a mile in radius.

Miraculously, no one was injured.

“I was very thankful,” said Ramona Solis, who was inside a home on Espina Street that was impaled with a flying wooden structure. “A neighbor, he came, and he goes, ‘That’s my porch.'”

Why did this neighborhood experience particularly damaging winds?

“We had convergence of winds – the outflow boundaries from a couple of storms that were in the area,” said ABC-7 Chief Meteorologist ‘Doppler’ Dave Speelman.

“It kind of acts like a bit of a vortex – like a dust devil – when you have the convergence of winds hitting together,” Speelman said. “That air hits together and then rises rapidly, so you get these thunderstorms that develop.”