Last night Shelly Bay residents were counting the cost of damage after what appeared to be a tornado tore through the area, ripping roofs of homes and toppling walls.While it is not known how high winds in the area reached, winds across the Island were recorded at storm strength, with gusts reaching 56mph (48 knots).The storm left a path of destruction starting at Shelly Bay in Hamilton Parish and crossing east through the Radnor Road area causing extensive damage to some homes while leaving others seemingly untouched. Several homes in the area lost roofs as high winds whipped through the area, tearing down walls, ripping branches from trees, blowing out windows and throwing lawn furniture.Paul MacIntyre, who lives at Shelly Hall, said he was sitting at the kitchen table with his children when he suddenly saw the wind pick up.“We could see the wind on the roof whipping up the water,” he said. “I could feel the pressure change in my ears. I thought ‘this has to be a tornado'.“I grabbed the little one out of her high chair and moved the other one away from the window. As I was doing that, I saw the wooden park bench get blown across the yard up into the fence.“If the storm landed in the middle of the yard, it could have easily thrown everything at the window. Luckily, nobody was hurt.“It came out of nowhere. There was really nothing we could do.”He said some metal shutters on the building's upper floor had been bent by the storm, and that a wall near the facility's pool had collapsed into the pool area. In the parking lot, leaves and small branches littered the pavement along with several toppled motorcycles.On Church Crescent, a housing complex had three sections of roof torn off during the storm, causing damage to multiple units.Workers at the site were yesterday trying to organise new shingling so the roof could be repaired, while working to secure several windows that had blown out.Across the street, a motorboat was lying across a driveway, blown off its supports by the force of the wind.One resident in the Radnor Road area said she was awoken at around 10am by a loud crash outside her room, but what she thought was just the sound of thunder was a section of the house's roof landing in the yard.Her mother said: “When we came home we didn't see any damage anywhere else. I thought, It couldn't have just been us, could it?”Yesterday, the Bermuda Weather Service were unable to confirm if the “severe weather event” was a tornado, or a “straight-line winds event”.While in a tornado winds change direction as they change altitude, a straight-line wind event, often associated with thunderstorms, a down draft causes high altitude winds to fall to ground level, causing a “mini front” and leading to extremely high winds over a limited area.Bermuda Weather Service director Dr Mark Guishard, said: “Regardless of the classification of the system, damage of discontinuous nature was evident, indicating that the phenomenon was unable to maintain itself long enough to establish a wide path of damage.“The impacts we have seen is in the order of roof damage and windows being blown out thankfully we have not heard any reports of injury.”He said the damage caused by the phenomenon was erratic, damaging one home property and skipping over several others before impacting another series of properties.While the service was not able to say for certain if it was a tornado that touched down near Shelly Bay, he said the service would continue to analyse the data with the intention of releasing a report online by the end of the week.“I am pleased to say that we were able to issue a warning prior to the event thanks to our diligent team, using the technology and expertise we have here.”Along with high rains, several areas suffered flooding as 1.23in of rain soaked the Island.A spokesman for the weather service said yesterday that the weather came to the Island from the southeast US.“Basically, there was a strong pressure gradient between two fronts, an unusually cold front with a high pressure approaching it,” he said.Weather is expected to be mostly clear until the weekend, when a storm system is expected to pass to the Island's north, bringing occasional showers with it.* See more images on our multi-media section.lUseful website: www.weather.bm