First off, to those of you that know I live in Kansas, I came out unscathed. All of the storms flew East of my home and the tornado that struck Southern Wichita was a 40 minute drive away.

Anyway, ironically enough I actually spent the majority of my day with a couple friends and my girlfriend attempting to chase these storms and spot a tornado. We followed behind a couple cells that looked promising, one of which looked REALLY promising, but despite obvious rotation we never saw anything hit ground.

By the time it started growing dark around 8:00 PM, we turned back to Wichita to grab some dinner and disperse. It wasn't until I was getting ready to drop my girlfriend off in Western Wichita that we got notice of the tornado over the radio. At that time it was a good half hour from Wichita, but sounded like it may be heading towards her home so we booked it up to Newton to play it safe and ride things out until the tornado passed. I managed to get home with 10-15 minutes to spare before any reports began to flow in about the tornado reaching Wichita.

After getting home and setting up my 2 meter radio, I began listening in on the spotters in Wichita and while one guy got really wound up as he was following right behind the tornado, it sounded like it was relatively mild. Reports were half mile wide, but judging by what I heard concerning damage and pictures I've seen so far, it was likely a F2 or F3 tornado. Dangerous, and will cause damage, but rarely levels a home. Based off preliminary supports, I going to go out on a limb and say there were no causalities, or at least very few. It appears the tornado entered Wichita from the South Central end and went East North East.

So that's my excitement for the day. Blew a day chasing storms only to miss a tornado on my back step. :P Granted, with the rainfall and night, it would have been nearly impossible to see anything.

So hopefully all of the other Wichita furs made it out alright! Sheba was in the path, but looks to be OK and out of the handful that I do know the locations of, they should have been in the clear. Here's to hoping that everyone in KS, OK and the surrounding areas came out OK!