Call it a Fourth of July miracle. A small tornado, with winds at 70 to 80 miles per hour, formed near Tavares, Florida, around 2:30 PM ET. The freaky storm caused damage to local business, including the Fish Camp on Lake Eustis. 80 people were celebrating Independence Day inside the U.S. Highway 441 eatery, according to the Orlando Sentinel, when the tornado hit. “I look up and there’s stuff flying from the patio across and I’m like ‘what the heck just happened?’ ”
said Robert Spittle, 41, a Pennsylvania native who was visiting the area. “I was there with my family,” Thomas Wert, an attorney from Orlando, said in an email to the Sentinel. “We left about a minute before the roof was torn off on our boat. I saw the funnel cloud over the restaurant as we pulled away. It was definitely a tornado.” Jim Jordan, the owner of the restaurant, said the tornado “sounded like a 9.0 earthquake,” per Fox 35. “We all ducked and ran out of the kitchen!” READ MORE