Robyn Locke knows what to do when she sees dirt fly.

She heads for cover.

“First I saw leaves moving, then the tall grass laying down in the pasture,” she said. “When I saw dirt flying, I knew.”

Locke is convinced the winds she saw Wednesday morning at about 11:30 a.m. on Tillman Mill Road were swirling with debris.

“It was not straight-line winds,” she said. “I know it was a tornado.” She said the swirling winds came up and stopped suddenly, so the event was possibly a mild tornado.

Rita White with the Emergency Management Agency said some residents in the Tillman Mill Road and Harris Loop area reported storm damage but she said the National Weather Service saw no evidence of rotation.

“We don’t think it was a tornado,” she said.

Locke has seen objects fly through the air before. Two years ago, parts of her mobile home went airborne.

“My home got demolished right here down at Coffman Trailer Park,” she said.

Since then, she and her family take no chances with tornado warnings. Wednesday’s swirling winds were particularly frightening, she said, because she and her sister, Jolaynna Young, were riding in the car with Young’s 4-month-old daughter, Addy.

“We had the baby in the back seat and I could hear stuff hitting the back windshield,” she said.

Locke had picked up her sister and the baby at the mobile home where they live because she feared for their safety after the incident two years ago. They were headed to the home of their mother, Peggy Rae, who was babysitting Locke’s 6-month-old son, Jacob Hokett.

“I was going to pass the driveway and back into it when stuff starts flying from the left toward the car,” she said. “I was going to keep going but when we got one house down, I saw a tree snap and blow across the road. I threw it in reverse and as soon as I did, it was over.”

The winds blew apart a shed behind Rae’s home. It was the second shed in as many years to be taken apart by storms, Locke said.

“We saw a futon wrapped around a tree and there’s stuff all over the yard that doesn’t belong to us,” she said.

Down the road, at Tillman Mill and Section Line, Daveen Stanford was cleaning debris from an empty cattle pasture.

“We’ve got some antique farm equipment that blew off a guy’s porch into my pasture,” she said. “A shed blew across the top of the house next door and tore shingles and siding off. All of it ended up in my pasture.”

A Bradford pear tree blew into the electric fence surrounding the pasture.

“It took the whole fence down, “ she said. “I’ll have to replace about a quarter to a half mile of fence.”

Stanford’s cattle are grazing on another farm, so her livestock was not in the path of the storm. Neighbors were helping clean the area, she said.

“The cattle pond’s got about eight trash cans in it,” she said. “We’ve got a horse to try to go in and get them out.”

In south Alabama, authorities said Wednesday they were unsure whether a tornado or strong thunderstorm hit the Fun Zone Skate Center in Montgomery, where about 30 children were attending preschool. An apartment complex across the street also was damaged, but no injuries were reported.

Elsewhere, according to the Associated Press, a possible tornado tore through a community south of Montgomery, toppling trees, overturning a mobile home and knocking out power at a school.

No serious injuries were reported.

The storms were part of a system moving into the state from the west. At least eight people were hurt in Mississippi, and one person was killed in Louisiana.