Some Western Bay residents were left shaken after a ‘mini-tornado' decided to pick on their property over the weekend.

Shirley Geros was at her home in Pahoia with her husband and daughter on Saturday afternoon when the weather began acting up.

She says it started at around 3pm, and lasted for half an hour.

'We got a whole of thunder and lightning, before the hail came in against the front of the house. Then it moved around the back and the clouds began hitting each other – the wind was blowing in two directions,” says Shirley.

'My daughter and I went to check on the dogs' kennels and saw there was no cage there, and found three of the four dog kennels had blown away.”

The pieces of kennel, which included sheets of corrugated iron, were blown around 80-100 metres over a wire fence into a neighbouring paddock

'We had to pull it bit by bit back up the hill. It took a couple of hours.”

The roller door to their shed was also buckled from the wind.

The buckled shed door.

Shirley says her neighbour came to help afterwards, and said all they'd had at their property was a couple of pot plants falling over.

Nonetheless, Shirley says her ‘unique' experience was ‘pretty scary' at the time.

'The only other instance I've ever struck anything like this before was in Australia around 30 years ago. That tornado picked up a caravan and a dog, which was carted away and no one saw again.”

MetService meteorologist Tom Adams says tornados can come in all shapes and sizes, but are not necessarily the cause of every strong wind event.

'One thing that happens often is people see some wind damage and assume it's a tornado, but there are other ways to get that kind of damage,” he says.

'When you have thunderstorms or heavy bursts of rain, you get downdrafts. So as well as updrafts of rapidly rising air, you can have rapidly descending air, which can cause a ‘gust front'. If you imagine pouring a bucket of water on the ground, the water will start spreading rapidly sideways when it hits the ground. The same effect happens with a downdraft of wind.”