Personal Story Of Yesterday’s Storm Outbreak

Yesterday morning’s derecho event was one that a senior forecaster at the NWS Storm Prediction Center in Norman, OK said was among the worst he has seen in the last decade — and it’s one we here in the Ozarks won’t soon forget.

Just to make sure I don’t, I’ll recap my memory of everything that happened to me yesterday.

Let’s start this whole thing at 7 a.m. on the dot Friday morning, which is when I woke up as it started raining torrentially outside — I had my window open the night prior as it was so humid outside, so I heard it all.

I couldn’t fall back asleep, so I got up about 7:15 and saw the lights start to flicker. I grabbed a very quick shower and started to head into the living room to watch the news at 7:30 when all the local stations began to show a constant radar loop of rain and a hook echo just north of Mount Vernon (15 miles west of Republic, where I live).

About 7:50, my younger brother Jason woke up and made a casual observation that the sky was growing horribly dark. Not long after he said that, I shut my bedroom window as we could hear the rain pelting the pavement in the living room. I went in to get into my work clothes, and when I came back into the living room, Jason told me the sky was turning green. This was just shortly after 8.

I grabbed my things and I got into my car as the tornado sirens sounded. Not the smartest thing to do, but if what KTTS radio was reporting at the time was correct, the storm was passing us to the east.

KTTS was wrong, however; I looked up and saw a pale green sky, and right under it, a funnel cloud. Either a tornado was about to begin, or had already struck and was going back up. I didn’t have time to stare at it, so I gunned my Acura due south on Elm Street toward Hwy. ZZ.

The NWS tornado track through Republic shows just how close I actually was to being caught in the tornado itself. Very scary stuff now that I think about it.

Around 8:10 I called my boss and told him that I was going to hang out in Republic for awhile and shoot video of the damage. I proceeded east on Highway 60 when the wind began to kick up and buffet my car. I pulled into the O’Reilly Auto Parts parking lot, partially to avoid pieces of the glass sign that were littering the highway from having just blown over.

I walked inside the store and talked to some employees who were very shaken up. They said they didn’t see a tornado, but the clouds were rotating and the next thing they knew the sign lifted up and blew over. They were okay aside from being a little perturbed from the storm coming close to hitting them.

I drove eastbound on US 60 toward Springfield when my boss directed me to go back into Republic and confirm if reports of Republic Ford taking a direct hit were true. As I turned back, the most harrowing event of the day for me began.

Driving westbound was infinitely harder than driving eastbound, as the wind kicked up directly across my vehicle and I struggled very hard to stay in my lane. I began to drive directly behind a semi-truck when suddenly my car felt like it was being lifted ever so slightly from below. This motion occurred for roughly three to five minutes.

The truck in front of me began to sway violently, and the driver recognized it as he pulled off onto the shoulder and got out of his cab. He ran as far from his truck as possible and began to flag down cars in an attempt to get them to stay away from the right lane. I passed the truck, but the scare still wasn’t over.

I happened upon a red light by the Wendy’s and Meeks stores, and as I was sitting there, the lifting sensation began again, and my car violently shook back and forth. I decided it was not safe to sit at that location, so I ran a red light and turned around on U.S. 60. This did not matter as there were very few cars out — it was around 8:25 and this was normally the morning rush hour.

I overstate things sometimes, but let me be very clear in that for a good five minutes I seriously feared for my life and prayed to the Lord to spare me as the wind continued to rock my vehicle.

The storm subsided and the rain began to quiet down, and around 8:30 my supervisor called and told me to report to the newsroom, grab my other equipment and head into Fair Grove. He said the high school there sustained serious damage as winds blew off the roof. I gunned it 80 m.p.h. eastbound on 60 and was at the newsroom at 8:45.

I had to drive through town and check on our church, which surprisingly survived the storm without incident. KTTS radio was just then beginning to report major damage about and outside of Springfield — damage that occurred the same time my car was being buffeted around. I take it that 3-5 minute timeframe was the cause of the worst damage locally.

En route to Fair Grove, the damage became worse and worse along US 65 northbound. The billboards outside of town were ripped to shreds and there was sheet metal lining the highway. Three ambulances roared down the highway southbound as I anticipated the worst.

I got to Fair Grove around 9:15 and had to park across the way from the school. It looked worse than I imagined…cinder blocks and bricks were everywhere, and kids were being led out of the middle school (it’s attached to the high school). The Greene County Sheriff’s Department and the entire Fair Grove Police Department were there, and it was evident they had anticipated a disaster of the worst proportions. Even Sheriff Jim Arnott was on scene and was very gracious to give an interview to begin things.

I took a photo, which turned out to be the very first imagery of the damage in Fair Grove shown to the general public — the TV folks couldn’t put up their live trucks’ masts because of the storm, so I relied on my Twitter account and my new iPhone to throw a photo online. Matt, our online guy back at the newsroom, picked it up and put it on the N-L website. Here it is:

As I gathered more footage, we were summoned over to a press conference with John Link, the Fair Grove superintendent of schools. He stated that amid all the chaos, the teachers and kids did a very good job by staying out in the hallway and covering themselves as debris rained down on them. By the grace of our Lord (and I don’t say that lightly), only four students suffered minor injuries — the damage looked like it was a sure bet there were fatalities, initially.

I wrapped up shooting footage of the school and began to make my way around Fair Grove’s residential neighborhoods on foot. The football and baseball fields were destroyed, lights blown over — and across the street it was worse.

One residence had a 500-pound piece of culvert pipe in their front yard, and there was no construction site nearby. Another residence had a tree resting on the front porch, and still another house had a neighbor’s metal shed dispatched neatly upside-down in the yard.

Further on, down Chestnut Street, the chaos was apparent. Jerome, my fellow photographer, had called and told me there was a roof blown off a house at an intersection there. I hitched a ride with a very friendly person from the high school and as we drove down Chestnut, people were walking back and forth looking at homes that had their garage doors blown in, their siding ripped off and their porches and fences destroyed.

I shot my footage and finished a piece involving one woman whose garage was destroyed — her next door neighbor was the gentleman whose roof had blown off, into her driveway no less. As we walked back, some of the residents struck up conversations telling us what they experienced — many thought it was a tornado, though the NWS never confirmed it.

I got back to the office just after noon and edited all my footage into a video story that generated an intense amount of web traffic. Even KSDK, our sister Gannett property and TV station out of St. Louis, featured my video on their website.

I finished my day around 4 p.m., as I had begun it eight hours earlier. I didn’t eat all day and as soon as I realized that, it caught up with me big time. I went home, ate, and looked at all the damage reports. Looks like we dodged a major bullet in Republic, but four people across the Ozarks unfortunately lost their lives.

The Lord was very good to my brother and I, and to our family as our property was spared and the only sign anything happened was a good amount of trash from blown over trash bins across our neighborhood. Once that was picked up, we were golden.

Still it was a harrowing experience for a bit there, and I’d be good if I never saw that green color, that funnel cloud — and if I would never have to relive those three to five minutes on US 60 again, I would be fine.

Allow me to quench your thirst for quality imagery and video of the storms, by pointing you to News-Leader.com for all you could want.