3/22/11 Creston, IA Chase TORNADO!

Mar 23, 2011

So I have been hard on Iowa over the years…

And as I have to write that in fact there are Tornadoes in Iowa I decided to make a map of all the FAIL I can remember…

Lets face it there is a ton of fail in Iowa… sure there is a little bit of WIN but not much.
Today was a day with a ton of WIN and a small amount of fail.

Met up with Tony Laubach and his friend Jennifer Brindley in Council Bluffs for some awesome Boxer BBQ.   Tony was a little more anxious to get to the target area of Nebraska City (Percival, IA)… I wanted to get in a couple more hours of work.     I finally took off for NE City around 2:30 meeting up with my IL friends at our favorite cap bust truck stop that has little to no cell service…
Well I have always THOUGHT it had little to no cell service just had not paid attention to something…. more on that in a later blog.

As we waited for the storms the string of pearls the models had depicted started to form, cells were over Beatrice/Lincoln heck even NE Nebraska…. the promising “cell of the day” was on a collision course with us.   I posted this image earlier in the day to my Facebook…. it’s hard to cross this border unless you are in Omaha so we waited it out.   Tony was a little more anxious and headed for Plattsmouth.   Thanks Dustin Wilcox for stopping by with a box we have been trying to exchange for months!

As the top of the blow off was over us we decided it was time to head further into Iowa….

We all broke up and started heading for different parts of the storm… it was hard keeping pace but doable.   Reports started coming in of the massive hail in Valley, NE (just a few miles from my house) but in the end Omaha was spared.   Jeff Gonzales got a tornado up by Missouri Valley which obviously was a small blow to my thought process (being much closer to home) but helped verify what Tony was thinking.

Just kept relentlessly chasing that one cell, there were some sheriff-nado reports on it IIRC but nothing I had seen…  did get this nice wall cloud that was interesting but died out.

About this time I ran into Chris Rice on the side of the road and stopped to talk.   Chris Rice has Threatnet so obviously this is a big plus

Down south heading for Creston was a interesting storm… made the decision to dump this beast and head for the tail end charlie.
Finding a North/South road was not that hard but the storm was moving rather fast and the core caught up with us.   Took on some Ping Pong sized hail… was a bit worried for a second that it was too much then we were out… well I was out lost Chris for a bit in the core but still talkin on the radio.

Coming out of the core of the storm (less than a mile) there was a wall cloud… we were coming into Creston at that time and I did not want to be in the town, we were ahead of the meso so my thought was to get to the west side and re-evaluate.   JUST as we enter the town I hear on the HAM radio “LARGE FUNNEL CLOUD OVER CRESTON”… it’s Brandon Sullivan.   HUH?   Looking all over I can’t see it.  “WHERE??” I said.   “Right over Creston!”.   Finally Chris Rice says “Look at 5:00″ sure enough large carrot funnel coming down just to the SW of town.  (Brandon was on the west side and why it appeared over the town)  As I pulled in a parking lot it touched down and I shot some stills.  

Now last place you want to be with a tornado on the ground is in a town so I started trying to come up with an escape route…. finally decided it was far enough away I needed to get closer to get some video.     Just as I am on the road I filmed it roping out.

Not a bad chase.   Not a bad day for Iowa Tornadoes.   Iowa is still not off my shit list but not bad to score a photogenic tornado on the the first chase of the year…. and to end all that Iowa fail!
Bunch of us met up for Steak at the Terribles Casino and headed for home.   Great way to start 2011!

Chris Rice, Steve Polley, Mike Brady, Jeremy Degenhart and I  (Photo Credit Steve Polley)