May 23 2008 Western Kansas

It's way after when this event happened, so I'm not going to go into detail. We had more or less the same story as most others did, aside from not seeing the Quinter EF4. We ditched that cell too early for the southern storm that would produce the tornadoes near Ness City only to find no road networks and having to play the waiting game for it to arrive anyway and got there no earlier than those who saw the beast up north. We made our first intercept around 222222222. The supercell turned into an absolute beast that looked to put down a large tornado, only to have the wall cloud and mesocyclone wrap completely in rain. We did catch a split second glimpse of the rope out of the tornado as the rain finally cleared out. It looked to put down another tornado quickly but decided to just rotate like crazy aloft for a while. I didn't like the storm anymore, so we bailed south. Soon reports of the Quinter EF4 came out and I smacked myself. The main event for us tornado wise was the rain wrapped crapfest north of Ness City. The most excited point occured slightly later on the supercell that formed on the southern flank of the Ness City supercell. After viewing several funnel clouds at close range in low contrast we decided to go for one last hurrah and went into the hook for a peak. The RFD began to blast us right as we emerged onto a large bridge overspeading 22222222222. The winds began to push the car hard in the direction of a very long fall into a lot of water so I booked it down the center of the bridge and finally off of it into a small valley. We parked near a couple other chasers, two of which were Mike Peregrine and Fred Plowman we would find out afterwards. It became apparent we were in for a ride, so I faced the car into the wind and started filming. Winds gusted to approx. 90-100 mph while ripping trees from the ground right outside my window. As they bent over I could hear the splintering of their trunks and branches when in an instant they came apart and went over. Click here for a video of the RFD event. After chatting with Mike and Fred we headed back to our room in Hayes. We crossed quite a bit of damage in the Quinter and Ellis area with overturned cars

First views of the supercell near 222222222222

Meso completely wrapped in rain. The tornado is barely visible on the very back end there on the left of the rain.

Rain cleared out a bit more and the very end of the tornado was visible for a moment.

Booking it through Ness City now with the sirens blaring. Dick McGowan and crew are just ahead of us.

Tornado sticking out of the back end here. The TIV and DOW crew had just passed us in the train of cars heading north along the highway.

Not sure if this is a new tornado or the above tornado roping out. Nothing was visible in the rain for a bit.

Wall cloud on the new southern storm now to our northwest near dusk.

It kept spitting out little funnel clouds like this one very near us. I was driving at this point and the camera had switched to auto focus and kept pulsing in and out of focus, most of the time out of focus so this was about as good a screen grab as I could get.

On the bridge now. I could see the wall of white booking it across the lake and knew if we weren't off by the time that hit us, we were toast.

We made it just in time for this. Hard to see what's going on here but these trees are being thrashed around by approx. 80 mph winds. Look at the left side. Now you see the tree...

And now you don't. Winds peaked to probably near triple digits at 90-100 mph and uprooted/snapped several of the pine trees next to us.

Mmm yeah, windy. It's hard to get me nervous during a chase but this got my blood a boilin. We knew it was not a tornado hitting us, but RFD winds can do considerable damage in themselves. The video of this rivals most of my tornado video, and certainly tops the tornado video that I got this day.

This house was just behind that row of trees that was shredded next to us. We were actually parked in the driveway to the house. This tree didn't stand a chance. Luckily it didn't fall in the direction of the house!

Here's a crappy screen grab of an uprooted tree that was right next to where Mike Peregrine and Fred Plowman were parked. A rider with one of them said they could feel their passenger side window bowing in.