Dancing tornadoes
By Bobbi Mlynar
Originally published 02:33 p.m., July 10, 2008
Updated 02:33 p.m., July 10, 2008
Tornadoes dipped and danced around the skies of Lyon and Chase counties late Wednesday afternoon, sending storm spotters, law enforcement officers and curious people out to watch the weather.
Preliminary information indicated that no one was injured in the storms, and only one tornado was believed to have touched down, according to information available this morning.
Children in the Summer Scape program operated at Timmerman School were at the Jones Aquatic Center when sirens sounded. They were taken to a storage building near the pool and squeezed into the small area for an uncomfortable, but safe, haven.
“The girls all cried,” one of the boys said afterwards.
Don Tevis, manager of the Emporia Municipal Airport, had a perfect vantage point for watching the storms from the airport, about four miles south of Emporia.
One of his employees spotted the first tornado and called to Tevis to join him.
“We looked down towards the south and just a little bit west — it looked like it was probably just straight west of Olpe there — and seen one stretching down from the base of the clouds,” Tevis said. “It was about halfway from the base of the clouds to the ground.”
Tevis said he had been surprised because the thunderheads they were coming from were fuzzy on top and beginning to dissipate.
A recent television broadcast had mentioned those types of clouds, Tevis said.
“They said they’re not strong enough to reach the ground, and I think that’s what these were here,” he said.
Before the flurry of tornadoes was over, Tevis had seen three larger tornadoes and several small ones.
“We had binoculars,” he said. “You could really see the clouds spinning around.”
He described them as resembling dust devils when they’re in the air.
“Usually you don’t see them until they reach the ground and start sucking in dirt and debris that makes them visible,” he said.
It was puzzling, then, when one of them “was real dark, charcoal gray, the funnel itself. It’s one of those things; it’s definitely a tornado,” Tevis said. “You can tell. It had good shape to it.”
He estimated the first tornado lasted three to four minutes; the second one stayed visible only a couple of minutes.
“And the last one stayed out there at least five minutes before it ... finally went back up into the clouds,” he said. “The last one was more straight west of us (at the airport). It looked like it was on the horizon, out by the turnpike somewhere.”
He estimated that the source of the tornadoes was within higher clouds, perhaps 5,000 to 6,000 feet.
“For a storm like that, that was high,” he said. “That made the tornado fairly long when it came down out of them. When they’re high like that, you can see them a long ways away. They look close, but they’re usually a lot farther than what you figure.”
Several tornados also were reported in Chase County, with one of them believed to have touched down near the Lyon/Chase County line. That report could not be confirmed before press time.