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.
