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Jules Vasquez Reporting
On Saturday afternoon the Crooked Tree lagoon looked so quiet, so picturesque - but hours earlier it was whipped up into a fearsome, fast moving tornado.

Ryan Seely, Captured Tornado On Camera
"I was around my computer watching a movie then my mom start to call my name and she said Ryan look outside and so when I look outside I saw a tornado - my camera was right there and so I grab my camera and I started to record."

Jules Vasquez
"What did you think when you were capturing it?"

Ryan Seely, Captured Tornado On Camera
"Well at first it wasn't looking like it was coming to my house. Everyone started to freak out then it change course and went into the creek and to the rest of the village. It was kind of scary."

Jules Vasquez
"Now you footage is famous, it will be all over local TV, it will be on the internet. So it will be like Belize's first twister footage. How do you feel to have that share in history?"

Ryan Seely, Captured Tornado On Camera
"Well I am proud because that's the first hand view of everything, so I am proud."

He's proud - but fir the rest of the village, they were just in stunned disbelief:

Winston Crawford, Villager
"My house is about 300 yards from the lagoon. I heard this rolling like a truck coming, so I went to the roadside to look but I didn't see any truck. Like something told me to look up in the sky, so as I look at the sky I see the clouds and it start to come together and twist up with each other and when I look I see the trees start to open and close and later I heard the limbs breaking up and mash up like "pow, pow"."

Bruce Tillett, Lost Cashew Trees
"The storm is like a big plane that wants to land but cannot stop landing."

Hon. Edmund Castro, Area Representative
"It's frightening Jules. I think we need to check with the people at the weather bureau because this is not the first time something like this happen to Crooked Tree in this same area, so I would like some study to carry out to see the time of the year that we can lookout for tornado in the Crooked Tree area."

Bruce Tillett, Lost Cashew Trees
"First time in my life I experience this. Now I know that "Jah" is there."

But it's not really a Tornado - according to chief met officer Dennis Gonguez, it is a direct product of Tropical Storm Harvey:

Dennis Gonguez, Chief MET Officer
"The tropical cyclone is made up this large vortex with lots of little vortices contributing to this big large circulation. My feeling is what happen is that one of these smaller vortices within the big tropical cyclone circulation made its way down to the surface, so we have this small little spinning - the small pocket of air spinning and that eventually made its way down to the surface. It was brought down to the surface by rain."

So it was not the kind of tornado common in the US Midwest:

Dennis Gonguez, Chief MET Officer
"It's a whole different dynamics involve in the formation of those tornados. Those require warm air coming up from the Gulf of Mexico overriding colder air over the United States and that creates that little vortex too and that vortex - that tube eventually points down to earth. This one, we don't have that same situation here. This is part of a larger tropical cyclone. This has occurred in the past with land falling tropical cyclones but we have not been able to detect it because it is mask or hidden in the wider destruction cause by the bigger scale cyclones if you follow what I mean. These little vortices do cause destruction but then we don't pay attention to those because we see the mass destruction caused by the big tropical cyclone - the big tropical storm."

Because this type of tornado is so small - there's no way the MET office can detect it, know where to expect it, or give advance warning.