5/26/2008 - When your "target" tornadoes -- and you're not there

Yes, that is a complicated title and may make more sense after you read this.

On Memorial Day, Sharon and I targeted the area near Pratt, KS – due west from Wichita on US 54. On our way to Pratt, we stopped by the tornado path on US 54 near Cairo. This is where a couple had died on Friday night as a nighttime tornado crossed the road, picked up their car, and hurled it 150 yards north of the road. Sadly, the vehicle was still lying in the wheat field. Witnessing this smashed vehicle was very sad – I can’t imagine what the couple thought as wrapping rain curtains engulfed their vehicle late that stormy night. Pure fear! Witnessing this tragedy illustrates just how important it is for me to continue my work into tornado casualties.

Thrown (squashed) vehicle in the center of the pic. I'm standing on the side of the road and using a zoom, which illustrates just how far this car was thrown.

After visiting the tornado path, we headed westbound on US 54. About 10 minutes west of where we had stopped, I looked in my rear-view mirror to see flashing lights. What was the reason for this? I was going 5 UNDER the speed limit! Wow! Turns out the cop pulled me over for “disregarding traffic sign/signal” – apparently I had failed to get over into the right lane when a passing lane appeared. Yes, there were two lanes (the left being a passing lane) and I had failed to get over into the right lane to allow “traffic” to speed by me on the left. But, wait; there were NO cars on the road behind me! Unbelievable! Again, I think this was an excuse to pull over an out of state car. Despite the rather “weak” reason to pull me over, the officer was nice and very inquisitive about the storm prospects later that day. After we gave him a forecast, and he gave me a formal warning, we headed off to Pratt.

We ended up spending many hours in Pratt awaiting convective initiation. Finally, convection fired to our southwest in rural Comanche County. We drove (via gravel roads) to Sun City where we watched a pair of supercells develop, slowly intensify, and coalesce. We slowly worked our way up toward US 54 west of Pratt. Visibility with this storm was tough – a layer of strato-cu continued to form in the massive inflow, making it nearly impossible to see the storm’s structure. The storm continued to backbuild and spit out mesos southwest of Pratt. Due to its right turning nature, we headed south out of Pratt toward Sawyer so we could stay ahead of the storm. West of Sawyer we watched the base finally become apparent in the rural area of southwest Pratt County. I was a bit disappointed in the structure of this high-precipitation supercell. In fact, I had decided to just let the storm migrate to the northeast and not chase it. Bad decision. As it headed through Pratt, it briefly tornadoed. Argh! After we heard the tornado report, my decision quickly reversed. We chased after the meso and eventually got ahead of the storm between Cairo and Cunningham, KS. We followed the storm as it headed toward Hutchinson, where we called it a night.

This is about as good as it got this day. Pretty bad day for photography. Even the tornado pics I've seen are bad.