On the afternoon of May 10, extreme weather suddenly struck Lingao County in Hainan Province. While riding her bike, a woman witnessed a dramatic scene as a tornado tore through a factory building, lifting it into the air. She quickly turned around to escape.

According to the local emergency management department, the tornado mainly impacted the core area of the Longfeng Storage and Logistics Park in Licheng Town. Approximately 2,700 square meters of sheet-metal factory buildings collapsed entirely in the strong winds. Steel structures were twisted and deformed, and roofing sheets were flung hundreds of meters away like pieces of paper. Fortunately, no casualties were reported.

The head of the logistics park stated that about half of the warehouses were destroyed, and large quantities of daily goods and construction materials were either swept into the air or buried under debris. Preliminary estimates place the damage at over 1.6 million yuan (around \$220,000).

“The wind was incredibly fast—within five minutes, an entire row of factory buildings had become a pile of scrap metal,” recalled Mr. Wang, an employee at the park. He added that only a dozen workers were present at the time and were able to evacuate in time thanks to an early weather warning, preventing a potential tragedy.

Lin Fang, chief forecaster at the Hainan Provincial Meteorological Bureau, explained that the tornado was closely linked to recent weather patterns. The interaction between cold air from the north and a monsoon trough over the South China Sea created highly unstable atmospheric conditions in northern Hainan. A low-level shear line and surface heat differences triggered the strong convective vortex that developed into the tornado over Licheng Town.