May 4, 2010
What a horrible day that ended in complete success!
Adam Lucio, Danny Neal & Ben Holcomb spent the night at Hotel Bennett, we knew we would be chasing the next day but I was determined to get a 1/2 day of work in. About mid morning someone in our Lincoln office got a virus on their machine so I had to run down there, figured we would be setup for my target of Beatrice/Falls City anyway. Needless to say when everyone left my house the new target was Nebraska City so I backtracked up there and did some TLC to the Mazda while I waited for them to arrive.
We started to see the storms pop around Salina, KS (Where everyone and their grandmother’s sister was sitting) and heading our way so we ducked South to get them.
The cells were warned however were dying on the NE border, much like an earlier April chase… Almost like NO TORNADOES FOR NEBRASKA IN APRIL FOOLS! We decided to press further east and catch a cell and core it because what else were we going to do today? After coring the storm (With nothing in it) we noticed organization starting to the south so we headed back down there. Inching and inching over the dirt roads (Ben was afraid the Mighty Mazda would get stuck HA!) we came upon the meso. We could not have possibly had a better position on this storm, everyone was to the south and we luckily were on the north end.
The storm motion was NE, we were on the NW side but out of the rain. We got all our tripods setup this was beauty in motion. The rapidly rotating wall cloud passed over the N/S road into a field at the top of a hill. It must have known the 5 very eager chasers and their camera’s aimed to get the catch of a lifetime, we could not have been a mile from it. Then there was the SPUT just a little uptick of dust that lasted for about 30 seconds, the area had rain so everything it was kicking up was mud making it very hard to condense.
Ben dropped our report and we continued to watch the rapidly rotating storm pass no more than 1/2 mile to our east, then came the rain. Danny and Adam had left their windows, doors heck might have had the sunroof open too and drenched all their gear. Ben being Ben took off like a rocket to get on the other side, we decided to simply wait and follow it down the road from behind, unfortunately it disorganized and died as it…. get ready for it…. hit the Nebraska border. With Danny and Adam’s equipment out of commission I let the chase as we intercepted a nice shelf cloud as the storm outflowed from the top of a hill, got some great shots.
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| From 04/28/10 Washington, KS TORNADO |
Then we tried to intercept the storm passing thru Fairbury once again giving up the chase as the Beatrice storm lit up, so once again we tried to catch it but they were moving too fast.
At the end of the day we had the “Video of the day” and I could not have been happier, we stopped in Lincoln to eat and edit our stuff before heading back to my house in Elkhorn for the night. Everyone uploaded their video to be sold to the networks and I uploaded mine to Youtube.
What a GREAT day and the 2nd time I have bagged a tor while working a 1/2 day so that makes me even more ecstatic.
In the morning I went to work and everyone else went to Iowa, I had my 7th tornado inside of a 8 days, I did not need to chase 
On another cool note, NWS Topeka used my video and pics to confirm the tornado…
http://www.crh.noaa.gov/news/display_cmsstory.php?wfo=top&storyid=51678&source=2