Experts with the National Weather Service were in Stanley Thursday trying to figure out if there was a tornado Wednesday evening.

There were destroyed homes, fallen trees, damaged cars. So the question was whether the damage was caused by a tornado or by something else.

Chris Strong, with the National Weather Service, is trying to find out.

"Much like a crime scene, you just have to take the best guess given the evidence that you have to figure out exactly what happened," says Strong.

His search for the answer took him to several places in the county.

"Really can't tell a whole lot from just one piece," says Strong. "The more pieces that you have, the better picture you're going to have of what happened."

He talked to the people who lived through the storm. All the bits of information may lead him to an answer.

"You start to see things more chaotically laid. That indicates something was more turbulent. Not necessarily, but more likely it was something tornadic," says Strong.

One of his last stops is at a collapsed chicken house. Some of the birds are still inside. He hears from witnesses there too.

"The building had collapsed, and the roof was still in mid-air," says Denny Gochenour, who witnessed the destruction.

Ultimately, Strong determines an EF-1 tornado did come through the county. He says winds peaked between 90 to 100 miles per hour.

It was just a year ago hurricane-force winds blew through Stanley. The National Weather Service found then that those were straight-line winds and not a tornado.