Parkersburg final report
Video below.
**Warning, I edited the video, but I may have missed a profane word near the beginning**
There was much discussion on whether we were even going to chase Sunday. The SPC didn't originally give the Parkersburg area a whole lot of attention, however after stepping outside, Kevin and I knew we would be chasing. It didn't take a whole lot of convincing to get Ben on board after the PDS watch was issued.
Kevin originally stated we should start in the Ackley area, but we all knew we needed to head northeast. The first warning came out when we were near the Highway 20 and I35 area.
Let me preface that Sundays chase was old school. Normally we chase with mobile internet and XM weather, but do to a multitude of problems (Ben leaving our equipment in Kansas last Friday); we were forced to just use GPS, weather radio, and a map.
See the maps below for actual positions. Each spot we stop and turn around, there is debris or law enforcement blocking the road.
We first picked up a wall cloud and spin-up just south of Ackley. I immediately called DMX and reported what we were seeing. As the storm progressed and moved east and north, we continued to observe a strengthening wall cloud and eventually a funnel and then tornado.
Our first though was that the tornado had a chance of hitting Aplington, however it moved south of town. The storm continued to strengthen and as our LSR's show, it progressed from 1/4 mile to 1/2 mile and finally a mile wide tornado when it hit the southern part of Parkersburg. The tornado was so wide that it was taking up most of our field of vision.
I was on the phone with DMX when we were getting into Parkersburg, and originally thought that the town was spared, however when we turned south, there was utter destruction. We were going to stay in town and help, but hearing numerous gas leaks, we decided to leave and try and continue tracking the storm. We had several satellite tornadoes pop up and at one point we had three tornadoes in our screenshot. Both of the satellite tornadoes resembled the Woodward tornado in size and features.
We chased all the way to the Waterloo airport, which we observed a 1/2 mile wide path of fence that was caked with mud. We are assuming that a large satellite tornado passed through, but it could have been incredible RFD.
We lost the wedge due to law enforcement closures of roads and debris preventing us to turn north.
We ended our day by stopping at DMX and showing them the video we took and helping them plot the path of the wedge and several satellites to help with the damage survey. Until that time, we had not seen the velocity on the storm and were blown away by the archive.
Given the damage, this will be rated at least an EF4, and looking at a particular devastated area, there may be a brief EF5 rating. We will know tomorrow when the weather service finishes up the damage survey.
On a personal note, the damage we saw was very sobering for me and Ben and Kevin. We have been chasing for years, and never saw anything remotely close to this. We got no thrill out of this chase. We were just happy that we were on the storm and were able to get the warning out before Parkersburg got hit and hopefully save lives. That should be the reason every chaser does this.
The video was chopped up by Photobucket. It is the best I can do for now and shows the birth to the destruction of Parkersburg
Ben is going to post some screenshots, if he has not done so already.
Everyone, please be safe the rest of the year.
~Quintin
