Who has been "in" a tornado

[Jason Foster]

For me, chasing was a evolution from my interests in tornadoes after I was in one in back in 1990.

I almost got killed by it because it had only been a minute or two since I walked home from the school bus stop. I commonly took a short cut through the woods and I would not have seen the tornado coming, not to mention the trees were completely torn up by the 'nado. I got on the news with my friend because our two-story tree house got torn down as well.

Anyway, I was wondering how many other's have been in a tornado, either chasing or not (hopefully not while chasing). I'll bet many early experiences prompted interest in severe weather for many of us.

 

[mike scantlin]

April 21st, 2007. Radar stopped loading, and we were driving through a "rain core" and we saw a spin up about 30 yards in front of us, then we got hit by another spin up under this Bowl-funnel. I believe it was a multi-vortex tornado. I was with Joey Ketchum, Chris Wilburn, and Russel Parsons. The radar capture is what DLed as we got out ahead of it, then i snapped this picture.

 

[Chris Wilburn]

That was very scary to say the least Mike. That was not very smart on my end and now I make it a point every 4-5 minutes to look at the time on my GRLevel and make sure it is accurate. Luckily we were on the outside of a weak tornado when we got caught up in it. I will never forget looking south of I-40 and seeing tumbleweeds less than a quarter of a mile away being picked up. Scary to say the least, but you learn from stuff like that.

 

[Joey Ketcham]

Definitely not something I want to experience again. We were also lucky in the sense that the tornado was coming from an open pasture, so debris was minimal. Still love that picture, Mike! Great job on capturing that!

 

[mike scantlin]

im just glad i didnt drop my camera out the window taking it.

 

[Danny Neal]

June 1st, 1999. Was chasing intense squall line with embedded supercells just north of Bloomington, IL. Had no radar just based squarely on eyes and local spotters and the NWS. Was on the north end of the line and was slipping south to at least get some wind. Well got more than I bargained for. As we were slipping south we noticed a "lowering"(more like scudy look alike crap) to our SW all the while intense lightning was spouting out. I really wish I had radar to see what exactly this storm looked like. I know NWS ILX issued blanket severe thunderstorm warnings and this storm had a history of producing at least one confirmed tornado earlier. We meandered west on a frontage road adjoining I-39. I had lost the area of interest through rain and hail and quickly emerged from the precip to find this wall of "darkness" to my west. We stopped and got out and started shooting video because it was such a clearcut difference between this "large rainshaft" and clear air. I assumed it was the leading edge of the gust front as it from the point looking due west stretching all the way southwest was the same feature. As it was getting closer, however, rotation was evident. From the naked eye it just looked like a rainshaft but in the video you can clearly see a rain wrapped cone tornado about a mile off to the west. Needless to say the weather started deteriorating significantly and we were caught in it. In the video we were driving south to get out of it as visibility dropped to zero. The van was rocking as winds i would guestimate approached 80 mph. We found the only shelter behind a big shed from some industrial company. In the video we faced to the north behind the shed as winds were blasting us from the south southeast, when the circulation passed it was blowing from the west northwest and within a matter of 3 minutes light rain was falling. About a 1/2 to north of us there were powerpoles snapped off and tree damage for about a football fields length. We called the local 911 office about a possible tornado 10 miles north of BMI moving to the E, but never did hear a warning. A warning was issued for a cell just south of us, but never ours. I don't officially call this my first "true" tornado because it came from literally out of no where. No wall cloud, none of your prototypical tornado precursors. I muse at the idea of it being one of those northern echos on a large bow echo pattern that briefly produced a tornado. With out radar and any of the resources we have today it will be hard to confirm it. At the time I personally thought of it as a mircoburst, but after going back and watching the video, there is definitely a hint of rotation and later on a major windshift. If I knew how to convert VHS to DVD or Youtube I would gladly post it and get your thoughts. That right there, however, is the closest I have been to a "tornado"

 

[Kem Poyner]

In a tornado

I have been "in" two tornados. The first was in 1964. My parents owned a mobile home park in Northeast iowa. Our trailer was completely destroyed. It ended up about thirty yards from our lot on its roof. It was one heck of a ride. Though we all sustained injuries, none were life threatening. The whole trailer park was destroyed as well as everything we owned. That is why I have been obsessed with tornados my whole life and why I chase them today.
The second was about 4 years ago near Shamrock Texas when I miss judged a nightime tornado on I-40. I took a direct hit while crouched along the side of the Lela overpass. Trashed my New Sport Trac and I had a bump on my head. You may have seen my video. Kem Poyner

 

[jeremy wilson]

march 2006 at 1 a.m. i took a direct hit from a weak tornado that was moving at 70 mph.
I saw the funnel lit up by lightning and it looked to be well off the ground. I had Paul Stofer giving me nowcast and he can attest to my hysterics when the funnel got over me and there was wild ground circulation. Hail with huge spikes on them whirled about my car. My car lifted about a foot off the ground and was set in the ditch oppisite of me and then lifted again and was sit right in the middle of the road. All i lost was a couple of tail lights and gained some nice dents.

Very stupid mistake i made that night,letting the circulation over take me like that. Thats why I hate rocket booster supes!

 

[AndrewFabel]

June 13th, 2007 (4 miles west of Orienta, OK on Highway 412 in the Glass Mountains)

I knew I was in a bad spot w/ MTN showing strong rotation to my south. I basically was right under the huge meso when the tornado dropped approx. 800 feet to my south. It was a sidewinder but def. moving directly at me. I was so close that I could see cactus being ripped out of the ground.

It was mesmerizing and I didn't want to leave my front row seat so I didn't. In a split second, I planned to keep filming until it got 100-200 feet away then jump into the steep ditch and take the hit. Since I was directly in front of the tornado, I was getting hit w/ light precip so my XL-1S was constantly going out of focus (I was even on manual focus too) which really pi**ed me off.

The tornado lilfted when it got 400-500 feet away and passed directly over my head. I could see the funnel spinning away prob. 200 feet over my head. That was 1 of 4 that I saw that supe spit out that day (actually early evening). One of the tornadoes that I filmed that day (elephant trunk), you prob. saw on CNN, TWC, FoxNews.

That was a fun storm.

 

[Darrin Rasberry]

Missed the W.F. tornado by two blocks when I was eight months old, although I have zero memory and my mom and dad have conflicting accounts of where we in fact were.

My grandmother's house was swallowed up entirely by the grand beast, and several of her neighbors perished. The entire ordeal is still an ongoing nightmare nearly thirty years later.

 

[Karen Politte]

Me. And it's not fun, not interesting, not cool, and not recommended.

KL

 

[AndrewFabel]

I checked my archives on the 6/13/07 Orienta (OK) tornado and my footage wasn't on CNN. I now remember I called CNN as well but they had already got that footage from another chaser.

 

[Mark Farnik]

I've had the unusually bad luck to be caught in three seperate tornadoes in my life. The first up close and personal encounter with a tornado was during the July 21, 1993 eastern CO tornado outbreak (the day of the prolific Last Chance F3 monster tornado). I was only 3 1/2 years old at the time so I don't recall the exact time, it was right after sundown so it was probably about 9 p.m. What I do remember is a massive classic supercell came out of the northwest. It had a tremendous amount of lightning in it, it was one of the most electrical storms I've ever seen. As the storm got closer, the stiff southeasterly breeze suddenly picked up to howling 40 mph+ inflow feeding directly into the storm. We had just finished eating dinner, and I remember looking out the north kitchen window and seeing a very large, very ominous lowering from which dangled a thick elephant trunk funnel which dissapeared below the treetops of the north windbreak of our farmstead. Having just watched 'The Wizard of Oz' for the first time and remembering what the tornado had looked like and what Hunk had called it, I started pointing out the window and shouting "Mommy, Daddy, it's a twister, it's a twister! Come look!" My parents thought I was joking at first, but upon my insistence they finally came to the window. All the color drained out their faces and I distincly recall my dad saying 'Oh SH**!' A few seconds later we got a phone call from one of our neighbors who lived about four miles west of us who told my dad that we'd better get down in the basement because he could see a tornado on the ground a few miles north of our place and it was heading straight for us.
My parents dragged me and my then 1 1/2 year old sister down the stairs into the basement and we hid in a closet. I don't remember too much else about it, but I do remember the roar of the tornado as it passed overhead. As it turned out, the tornado destroyed a natural gas pumping shed 3/10 of a mile north of our place on the Weld/Morgan county line and threw the debris into my dad's wheat field immediately north of our farmstead, as well as destroying nearly a quarter mile of barbed wire fence. The tornado then lifted to treetop level over our farm and our neighbor's place, thanfully sparing us from nothing worse than some broke tops/branches of a few of our elm trees and ripping most of the shingles off our roof and our neighbor's roof. The tornado touched down again two miles down the road on the northeast corner of my aunt and uncle's farmstead and picked up five out of their six granaries (the first five were on wooden foundations, the sixth was bolted to a cement pad), two of them full of several thousand bushels of freshly harvested wheat, and dropped them randomly a tenth to almost a half a mile to the south and southeast, crushing them like popcans. It was rated as a low end F2 tornado by the Denver WFO. This same storm later went on to produce what was ruled by the Denver WFO as an extreme downburst (but from eyewitness accounts was most definitely a tornado) near the the town of Hillrose, CO, obliterating a rural mobile home and killing it's occupant, a middle aged man.

 

[Mark Farnik]

My second encounter with a tornado came on May 17, 2000, the day of one of the largest tornado outbreaks ever witnessed across northeastern Colorado, as well as the infamous and well documented Brady, NE F3. Over two dozen tornadoes were documented across eastern Colorado and southwestern Nebraska, the majority of them thankfully occurring over open country and causing no or minor damage. Our farmstead had the distinct misfortune of being hit by one of the few damaging tornadoes of the day. Between 11 a.m. and 4 p.m., we had been affected by several vicious HP supercells and witnessed two seperate tornadoes and had spent most of the afternoon either looking out the windows or hiding in the basement. The last storm had affected us around 3:45 p.m., and as time went by and a storm didn't come, we were lulled into a false sense of security. Me and my younger sister were both home sick, and we decided that it was safe to go up into our attic and dork around up there. It was just after 4:30 p.m., and suddenly the sky grew dark. I looked out the attic window and saw a very pronounced mesocyclone overhead. As I watched, a tornado formed right overhead, and in seconds the grass was flattened and the Siberian elm trees were bent over almost to the ground, and branches started flying past the window. I grabbed my sister and we flew down the stairs and hauled tail to the basement, where my parents were already huddling under a mattress. Me and my sister dove under it, and as we lay there, all of our ears popped, and I heard things hitting against the side of the house, and the roar of the tornado was like a cross between a squealing pig, a deafening waterfall and a jet engine. It lasted only about ten seconds, but it was a very long ten seconds indeed. When the wind died down, we emerged from under the mattress and headed upstairs to check out the damage. It was mercifully minor. About a dozen of our elm trees were severly damaged, there were tree tops and tree branches everywhere, part of the roof of one of our outbuildings had been torn off, a stray 2x4 was lodged firmly in the side of my dad's machine shed, and every window screen on the north side of our house had been ripped off, one of them wrapped neatly around a honeylocust tree that stands a few yards north of our house. Our neighbors a quarter mile to the southwest fared much worse. It collapsed their garage, picked up the westernmost of their granaries in their six granary row and bounced it across the tops of the other five granaries before dropping it in a field two tenths of a mile to the east of where it had once been, destroyed several abandoned outbuildings and blew a large elm tree into the roof of their house. This tornado was unique because while it was only on the ground for about a mile, it tracked from northeast to southwest, which is an extremely unusual occurrence. The Denver WFO sent out a damage survey team and they ranked it a mid-range F2. Once again, we had lucked out.

 

[Mark Farnik]

My final and most harrowing encounter with a tornado is my accidental nighttime rendezvous in northwestern KS during the March 28, 2007 High Plains 'March Madness' Outbreak. I have a post somewhere on here giving a blow by blow account of my encounter, but I'm feeling too lazy to find it attm. If somebody else wants to dig it up and put a link to the thread, be my guest.
The basic premise is that I drove into a rain wrapped tornado about 10:30 p.m. at night about four miles north/northwest of Bird City, KS and was forced to seek shelter in an abandoned farmhouse just off Highway 161 as the tornado passed overhead. Very fortunately me and my chase vehicle (a 1997 Ford F-150 I borrowed from my dad) were not significantly harmed, though I fully realize the outcome could have been very different if it had been a stronger tornado. I can say with certainty that I will never chase without continous data again and also that I'm not much of a fan of after dark chasing in the wake of that experience...