[GrnMtnFire]

The tornadoes that do hit Vermont (maybe 1 or 2) in the last few years are usally EF0-EF1's with speeds rarely exceeding 100mph. One struck central Vermont (Washington/East Barre area) that was an EF0/1. I recall hearing the wind speed was about 75.

[68vette]

I have home in Central Vermont that gets beat up bad by heavy winds, only in the winter. For the better part of the last ten years we have had to replace small sections of shingles every spring. This year we decided to replace the whole roof. Hopefully this will be the end of it for a few years anyway. It's not tornado type winds, but it is constant. Sometimes at night it's like a freight train is coming through the side of the house. The joys of living at a higher elevation in the winter.

[RunawayJim]

We went on our honeymoon and stayed in Stowe in June 2008. It started off extremely hot, but we found out that there were tornado warnings for the whole state and high winds. The power went out in Stowe while we were eating at the Shed (luckily, our food was cooked before the power went out). We were sitting in a glass room and I was getting seriously nervous that the trees were gonna fall over onto us.

Like most of New England, Vermont can get serious weather. The one nice thing about pretty much all of New England is that we tend not to have major natural disasters that much of the rest of the country gets (hurricanes in the southeast; major tornadoes in the midwest; earthquakes, mudslides, wild fires in the west; avalanches in the Rockies). We can get major wind storms and thunderstorms, which are severe. We usually get remnants of hurricanes (though southern New England and coastal Maine can get actual hurricanes on occasion). We get the occasional blizzard and there have been some very severe ice storms in recent years.

[Mark-faf]

One other factor in severe weather is elevation. Generally hilltops and exposed terrain are more prone to snow, it can be damaging wet snow in spring and fall. Wind can be an issue on ridges and hilltops. Ice storms are elevation dependent, but depending on the storm, it could be worse in valleys or hilltops.

Thunderstorms happen but few are severe, but again, more lightning strikes on hilltops. In Vermont, severe weather is dominated by winter events, especially ice.

Mark