I'll chime in with my own story here. It's not really a core punch, but the core formed right over me and i had to punch OUT of it, not THROUGH it.
The date was June 26th, 2004. I live in a small town called Parker, and the city was celebrating it's 125th Anniversary. Carnival, street dance, all the good stuff. Anyways, just like every day I don't work, I sat looking at models, when it hit me. It's going to storm, and by God did it storm. The National Weather Service had said to expect a "20% chance of precipitation". Well, I was bored and I hate Parker, so I decided I'd go sit west of town and watch the storms form and swing through. I'm watching from CU field all the way to major storm. I was watching this one cloud that seemed to be out-growing the other few that had towers. I watched it start rain, shoot off some lightning, and I took some photos. I was doing lightning photography when I looked on the southwest edge and noticed the Rain Free Base. No rotation, no lowering. Resumed lightening photos. About 10 minutes pass, and I peek around. Rain Free Base still there, grew a little bit, small lowering in the center. No rotation, but the lowering was getting larger. This is getting interesting. I called my father, the local fire chief, and informed him of the situation. I also called Todd Heintkamp, NWS Warning Coordinator, and Tom Gillespie, Turner County Emergency Manager, (both good friends of mine) and talked about the situation. Todd said that they were watching the cell, but the radar showed low-level rotation, but very isolated and weak. Tom said he was going to position himself south of my location (he's as obsessed with storms as I am). So, I get off the phone, and by this time the Rain Free Base with very little rotation is right over me. It's starting to get a little breezy (by breezy I mean South Dakota breezy, 30-40 mph). This is not good, I say to myself. I look up and, lo and behold, a rather interesting funnel. A few curse words come out as I dash back to my car, grab the camera, and snap a shot of the funnel straight up. It hadn't touched down yet. The dumbest 3 seconds of my life. I hopped in my car and sped (and boy do i mean sped) south away from the east-northeast moving storm. Looked in the rear view mirror and was stupified by a huge dust cloud where I was just sitting not 15 seconds earlier. Dialed up 911, dialed up my father, dialed up Tom, and dialed up Todd. Got away, and sat with the Turner County Sheriff and 2 of his deputies south of town watching as one tornado and several dust swirls ripped through the county taking trees with.
Now, my story isn't the scary part. The scary part is this: When I called my dad and told him (and I quote) "Jesus Christ dad, I'm looking at another tornado coming towards town." "You gotta be sh*tting me. Serious?" "Serious as cancer." "Ok, get the hell out of there. Call me with any more updates." I was only two miles out of town, so I could hear the sirens. Now, the scary part is that this occurred in the middle of the demolition derby at the fairgrounds. That's about 2,000 people in an open grandstand build in the 1950's. All sheet metal. My mom was there, and she said they were crowded in the bathrooms litterally cheek to cheek. And there were still approximately 1,500 people outside running for any cover.
The tornado dissapated before it got to town, but still. That made me truly scared for the first time during a chase.
I talked to Todd again after the storm, and he said that they new it was going to storm, but he had talked to the SPC and they agreed that there wasn't one thing that would even remotely make them think that it was going to get that bad. Even during the warning, radar didn't indicate strong enough rotation, so I sent him my pics and he was amazed that one can form that quick and have such little rotation. Oh, and that was the first time I was the cause of a tornado warning!
Big mistake. The storm was moving faster than we could and suddenly we were being pelted with softball sized hail. Jay was ahead of me and he started yelling on the radio to turn around as the hail was exploding on the road ahead of us. We got turned around and out of it, when the road turned back to the right and the core caught us again. This was the first time I had driven in severe weather and I swore the windshield was going to go. When the core finally passed us we pulled over and I was shaking. Jay thought it would be funny to record me calling my then boyfriend to tell him I had totaled his Jeep. Oops....
The cool thing about being in two vehicles that day was we were able to get two different views of the same thing. Unfortunately Bill will never be able to sell his video.......I said some things that I didn't know I knew. LOL.
