A relatively harmless storm that scared the shit out of me in 2011...
It’s inevitable that while being an active storm chaser, you’ll eventually find yourself in a few sticky situations. Either the road you’re on will suddenly stop even though your GPS says it doesn’t, or perhaps the storm comes at you quicker than you thought it would. It can happen to anyone and it’s a risk we all as chasers accept. I’ve always been content with being the chaser that likes to get close to the action, but not “Mtn. Dew swigging, adrenaline junkie, XTREME” kind of close. It’s just not my style.
On May 19th, 2011 I chased a slight risk in Central Kansas with Jason Groenhof, Ryan Kushner, and we eventually met up with Eric Treece later in the day who was out in his own vehicle. We monitored the synoptics and models like usual throughout the afternoon and decided to wait for storms in Hays. One big storm blew up near of the small town of Dorrance, KS and off we went after it going further E on I-70. We got ahead of the storm and pulled off I-70 at the Wilson exit and watched. We could see some lowering’s on the storm but we didn’t have a great vantage point. As the cell moved to the northeast over I-70 we had a decision to make. We could either track along with this storm for awhile or wait for a few more cells coming up from the south. Eric suggested we cross back over to the north side of I-70 just to give our current storm a few more minutes to get its act together.
We crossed I-70 and entered the Wilson Lake park grounds. As we crested a small hill, I glanced over at the base of the storm and the thing was spinning like a top. Within seconds, an amazing looking tornado touched down in the field right next to us!
I pulled over and just kept repeating, “tornado, tornado, tornado” in an almost too calm fashion. It lifted quickly after being on the ground for 3-5 seconds at the most. My calmness wouldn’t last. The video I shot that day which I’ve never posted before picks up the rest of the incident…
***DISCLAIMER*** There is a lot of swearing and I mean A LOT of swearing in the video. Also, I’d say you need some decent speakers or headphones to really feel the intensity in the car that day. Sorry Mom! Haha…
Of course looking back on it now, it was most certainly an overreaction on my part. I just really, really hate driving through messy HP cores. As you can hear in the video, I had a hard time identifying parts of the storm and I was so disoriented. That’s dangerous and it’s certainly a bit nerve wracking seeing tornado reports pop up on a storm that you’re blindly driving through the core of. Like I mentioned up above, these things can happen. In this instance after we saw the tornado, I didn’t want to run away and possibly miss another tornado. Also, I didn’t realize that the road network on the park grounds didn’t offer much in the way of N/E/S/W options which kind of left us stuck. Lastly, the storm wasn’t moving incredibly fast but it seemed like it was right on top of us within a few seconds! All of those factors put us in a pretty bad spot. So anyway, that was my “oh shit!” moment of the 2011 season. I know there’ll be more down the line. Hopefully next time I won’t overreact and swear so much haha…
