Witness records gustnado in Yulee

David Christian was sitting in his car in the parking lot of the Home Depot on State Road A1A in Yulee with his cellphone camera out when a gustnado blew through Monday afternoon.

At the time, Christian didn't know where the small, low-level tornado's funnel cloud was going, but he was prepared to get out of there if he had to.

"I was thinking in the back of my mind, 'OK, 'If I have to leave, where do I need to go?'" Christian said.

He sat in his car and watched some dark clouds become something else.

"I mean, it looked like a tornado," he said. "You could see it. It was almost transparent. You could see it go down, and once it went down it got the blackish look."

The funnel cloud lasted only a few seconds and didn't do much damage. It formed over a wooded area away from houses or people.

"It was just like in a wooded area along the side of the road," said Aarron Lipford, who also witnessed the funnel cloud. "It just kind of traveled. You could see it, and I thought, 'Oh, wicked.'"

Witnesses say shortly after the twister appeared, hail about the size of a Tic Tac began to fall out of the sky.

"Yeah, that is incredible video," Danny Hinson, Nassau County's emergency management director, said of Christian's cellphone recording.

Hinson said there wasn't so much as a power outage reported Monday night.

"Folks that live in the area, that work for the county, did not even say the lights flickered. We really were very fortunate," he said. "Can you just imagine if this was on the ground for 10, 12, 15 minutes? That would scare me."

Hinson's department did issue a funnel cloud advisory about 8 p.m. Monday, but by that time the twister had already broken up.

There was more rain and lightning Tuesday in Nassau County, but very little wind and no reports of any more funnel clouds.