featuring Connor Mockett
Hello, everyone! Welcome back to another Life with Connor the Weatherman column. This week will be a continuation of the story of each chase day from my Tornado Alley vacation this past May. Last column I talked about our Colorado chase, and left off with a little bit of a cliffhanger about the day after Colorado, which was Iowa. So, this story time will be about Iowa!
After our Colorado chase ended at 11:00pm on May 20th, we knew May 21st in Iowa was going to be a big day for tornadoes. Of course, being in Colorado, we’re a good distance away from Iowa, especially at that time of day. But, we’re there to chase storms, so chase storms we shall. We knew if we stopped to sleep that we wouldn’t make it to the storms the next day, so we drove all night long. A 5 hour drive in the middle of the night from Yuma, Colorado to Lincoln, Nebraska. We were totally exhausted when we got to our hotel at 4:30am, and were very thankful that the Motel 6 just off I-80 let us check in at that time. We parked the truck, went to bed, after 5 or 5 1/2 hours of sleep. Back on the road we went around 9:30am.
Our drive to our target area in Iowa, around Greenfield, was about 2-3 hours away from the hotel we stayed at. So we ended up getting in the area around noon-ish. As soon as we stopped, storms were already forming and tornado warnings by 12:30 in the afternoon in Iowa. Very early start. We looked up at the sky and thought “man, this sky just has violent tornado vibes”, as a “particularly dangerous situation” tornado watch was issued. We all stood around in a parking lot and had a conversation with the team, making sure everyone was on the same page, as the day could get out of hand rather fast and we didn’t want anyone getting left behind.
We went further east near Winterset, Iowa, to wait for the tornado storm warning to come to us so we could line it up with where we were. We wanted to play it safe with how violent the atmosphere was that day, so our chase style was a bit different in terms of letting it come to us instead of being aggressive. As we were waiting, the storm ended up producing an incredibly violent tornado that went through Greenfield, Iowa, completely obliterating the town that we were in before. The tornado dissipated before getting to us though, so we missed the whole thing.
Honestly, I was quite alright with missing that tornado. It completely destroyed homes and businesses, killed people, and ruined people’s lives. Not sure I’d want to be a part of search and rescue, coming up on injured people after a tornado that violent. In the weeks after, the tornado would eventually be found to be the strongest tornado EVER recorded. Stronger than the 2013 El Reno and Moore, Oklahoma tornadoes, stronger than all EF-5’s ever. It would have been a sight to see, but after what it did, I’m glad we missed it.
The storms were moving so fast that day, that we had to go upwards of 80km/h in order to keep up with them, and even then we couldn’t with winding roads and stop signs. We ended the chase in Oskaloosa, Iowa after the storm ran us over and quickly left the area. We hung out for a bit, chatted with other chasers, and then hit the road again for some more driving.
Initially we thought we were spending the night in Kansas City, but since we are there to chase, we ended up driving to Wichita, Kansas to try and get to Texas in time to chase on the 22nd. I’ll have that story in the next column. It’ll be a longer one, that’s for sure. Thanks for reading!
