There have been two very frightening non chase experiences at my farm in northern Morgan County, Colorado.
The first was on July 12, 1993. About 9 p.m. in the evening on supercell thunderstorm barreled off the Cheyenne Ridge and was headed straight for us. I knew something was wrong when the winds started blowing into rather than out of the storm as it usually did when storms approached from that direction (I was only 3 1/2 years old at the time so I wasn't familiar with the term inflow
) About 9:15 our neighbor Gene Wirth (also my dad's cousin) called us to tell us a tornado had been spotted southwest of New Raymer and was dropping south, so we needed to take cover immediately.
As soon as my mom hung up she brought me over to the north window in our porch to have a look. The lightning was absolutely insane, and illuminated through our windbreak of Siberian elm I could see a massive, black wall cloud with a tornado that looked like Mickey Mouse's head. I know that seems like a typical connection a tyke my age would have made, but to this day even my mom swears it looked like him. The funnel was rounded at the top with two half circlular cloud formations on either side that looked like the bottom of his ears, and sticking out from the bottom of the rounded part the funnel narrowed but then bulged out again, making it look like his nose, the tip of which was obscured by a debris cloud. It was bearing down on us at about 30 mph I would guess, because the tornado rapidly filled the entire northern sky.
We ran down into the basement, got in the guest room closet, and waited. The wind slowly began to howl louder and louder, and then the house began to shake. Me and my little sister were bawling, my parents were holding on to eachother so tightly a crowbar couldn't have pryed them apart, and then suddenly it went quiet. Dead quiet. It was so eerily silent you could have heard a mouse fart. Then the wind started howling again, and you could hear things banging against the steel siding of the house with loud bangs. A minute later it subsided. We were so terrified we stayed in the basment the rest of the night, and went out the next morning to find that miracously, the farm had suffered little damage. Three quarters of a mile north of us it had hit a small natural gas plant on the northeast corner of the intersection of our road and the road that straddled the Morgan/Weld county line, blowing the steel and corrugated sheetmetal building across the road and into our field, completely trashing it. It also flattened a great deal of fence, a few of the posts landing in our farmyard, some of which had smacked the house. It then lifted over our farm, though still downing tree branches and ripping a lot of shingles from the roof, and touched down again at my aunt and uncles farm two miles to the south.
They had seven grainaries about 50 yards northeast of their house. The tornado swept all but one away (that one was on a concrete foundation) dropping them a half mile to the southeast, crushed like tin cans. Lucky for my aunt and uncle the tornado missed the house and they lost only shingles and part of a roof on one of their other outbuildings. The NWS came out and surveyed that storm and determined it to have been a high end F2. We were very fortunate, as later that night that same storm produced an F3 which hit a farm near Hillrose without warning and killed a man in a mobile home that was blown apart. That storm was the catalyst for my interest in severe weather and the weather in general. 8)
Seven years later our farm would again be in the path of a tornado. The date was Tuesday, May 17, 2000. Having watched the SPC forecasts and area forecast discussions closely for several days, I knew there was going to be a severe weather outbreak that day in northeastern CO. At 11 a.m., the meterologist on 9 News KUSA showed a temperature map. At Sidney, NE, just 90 miles to my northeast, the temperature was at 32 degrees. At Burlington, about a hundred twenty miles to the south of Sidney, the temperature was at 80 degrees. :shock: I knew instantly that we were going to see tornadoes that day. Add in the fact that the dewpoint at Sidney was around 30 and the dewpoint at Burlington was pushing 60, a Denver Cylcone was developing, surface low pressure was rapidly deeping over Limon, and there you have a perfect scenario for a northeastern CO tornado outbreak. Severe thunderstorms were already exploding over Denver, dropping significant hail and catching many people off guard. I was sick (read: playing hooky so I could closely monitor the situation :twisted: ) that day, so I was at home. I stepped outside into my driveway and watched the most incredible storm development rates I've ever seen. The storms literally went from 20,000 feet to 60,000 feet in five minutes. It was insane, to say the least. Then about noon, the storms moved in. For the next three hours we would be subject to bouts of blinding rain, quarter to golf ball size hail and two tornadoes, one of which was a brief spinup to the west of the house and lasted only 30 seconds, the other which was a cookie sheet shaped funnel that swirled in open country about five miles to our east for about ten minutes before it dissipated. About 4 o'clock, I was going crazy looking at the LSR's and seeing the number of twisters that had been reported across northeastern CO and southwestern NE. The storm seemed to have let up, so we moved out of the basement and me and my little sister went up into the attic to hang out. I was looking out the south window of the attic when the grass suddenly went flat and the trees leaned over so far you could see the tops of their rootballs. I grabbed my little sister and we fled downstairs as the house began to shake violently. My dad was napping in the guest room in the basement and we went and woke him up. We sat there for a moment, listening in awe to what we were hearing. It sounded like a cross between a vacuum cleaner and a squealing pig. I ran back upstairs to my parents dismay and looked up out the window. A large, fat white funnel was hanging directly overhead, rotating violently and lowering. At that moment every screen on the north side of the house was sucked off, one of them wrapping itself around a honey locust just north of the house, the others disappearing into the swirling funnel. I was paralyzed as I watched some of the tops and branches of our trees fly through the air and crash to the ground in the hellacious wind, a truck tire on top of a granary flying through the air and smashing into another outbuilding, the swingset me and my sister had once played on go bouncing across the yard like it was made of paper. When the wind finally subsided, we went outside to survey the damage. It wasn't insignificant, but it could have been a lot worse. A quarter mile to our southwest on our neighbors farm, there were seven granaries, lined up east to west except for one small one on the west end of the row. The tornado had picked up that granary, bounced it across the tops of the other granaries and dropped it a hundred yards east of its orignal location. It also collapsed an old garage and blew a large tree onto the neighbor's house. The NWS survey indicated that we had been hit by yet another F2. That day over two dozen tornadoes struck northeastern CO alone. Thankfully damage was limited to a few farms and ranches, as it could have been a lot worse if one of them had struck one of the towns out here. This was also the day that the well documented Brady, NE F3 tornado occurred.
Our farm was also hit by an F2 in July of 1980 and a tornado of unknown strength in 1955, according to my dad and grandfather, respectively.
Our farmstead has been hit four times in the last 51 years. :shock: That's pretty impressive statistically, I think. It's rare for a tornado to strike the same location twice in a thousand years, let alone four times in 51 years! So I guess we're just a statistical anomaly.
Anyway, that's my two most intense non-chasing experiences.
