LAPLACE — Robert Ricks said he knew the weather was going to be bad on Tuesday.

The lead forecaster for the National Weather Service New Orleans, based in Slidell, said the national office had issued a warning earlier in the week that the New Orleans area would be at moderate risk for severe weather throughout the day Tuesday. That itself was a rarity.

“To get a notice that we were at a moderate risk this far south is very rare,” Ricks said. “We felt confident that this was going to be a pretty big event.”

They were right.

The National Weather Service confirmed two tornados touched down in St. John the Baptist Parish Tuesday, one of them causing significant damage along a 4.5 mile long and 200-yard wide path that traveled on a west-to-east diagonal path from New Wine Christian Fellowship on Airline Highway to near the junction of I-10 and I-55.

Ricks said earlier reports that the area had been struck by seven tornados were incorrect and may have been based on a graphic the NWS issued showing areas of circulation captured on radar.

Five teams were sent out to investigate on Wednesday and confirmed as many as nine tornado tracks in the greater New Orleans area.  Meteorologist Phil Grigsby was on the team sent to LaPlace to survey the damage.

“Of the storm surveys I’ve done, this was pretty significant,” he said. “It was right up there.”

Parish official estimate more than 300 homes and 50 businesses were damaged or destroyed and 9,200 were left without power.

Using the debris fields, Grigsby determined the tornado began near New Wine Christian Fellowship at approximately 4:05 p.m. as a High End F1, with winds of approximately 100 to 110 mph. It picked up strength as it moved across the Riverlands Subdivision then Cambridge with winds of 111 to 130 mph. It reached its peak near the Indigo Lakes Subdivision with winds of 130 to 135 mph. It then crossed to the Frenier area and dissipated rather quickly.

Grigsby said another tornado had begun at approximately 3:38 p.m. in northern St. James Parish and crossed to Lake Maurepas in St. John. That storm was rated an F0 with little damage except to trees.

Ricks said Tuesday’s storm system came out of the Rocky Mountains over the weekend and was almost immediately pegged as a dangerous situation to watch.

“It was a very strong low pressure system that dropped out of the Rockies rather quickly,” Ricks said. “As it crossed into Texas, we started to see that it had the potential to be a big event once it hit the warmer air in the south. In fact, some of the low pressures seen (Tuesday) were some of the lowest ever seen in this area in February.”

The strongest tornado ever to hit LaPlace was an F4 in 1983, which caused 25 injuries. The deadliest tornado was an F3 spawned by Hurricane Andrew in 1992, which caused two deaths and 32 injuries.

Grigsby saw this one coming too. He was the one who issued the actual tornado warning for the area.

“I saw the circulation on the radar and said, ‘This is going to be bad,’” he said.