May 22nd, 2008 Chase - West Central Kansas

I arrived in Hayes, KS the morning of May 22nd. A deep low pressure had moved into place and was expected to stay in place by an Omega Block thru Saturday combined with Memorial day it would have meant 4 days of chasing within a state or two. I was able to finagle myself into a room early, checked my e-mail, current conditions, and took a quick nap. Around 1:40 the first disaster struch, I dropped my laptop on the ground from about 2 feet, it landed on the cord, the cord pin was totally mangled and I was afraid the power jack inside the computer was also messed up. I grabbed the phone book and headed out to radio shack, picked up a universal power suppy (really expensive, does everything though) and it worked great. I will have to send my laptop in for jack repair at some point (2nd time, first time I dropped it though). This gave me a late start, I then went 30 miles West on I-70 after convection began maybe 45 minutes earlier, about 45+ miles to the SW along the dryline. The first two tornado warned cells that passed did not produce tornado’s, they did have lowerings at the updraft, and possibly were producing on their approch (I had a pair of binnoculars as I was under one cell I would peer thru the binnoculars at the next cell behind it). The third cell did produce a nice rope just as it crossed I-70, as well as the next cell.

I repositioned East. This is when my car died, total electronic failure. The electronic locks, windows, the little dinger when you put the keys in, everything was dead. I grabbed my backup jump start battery out of my trunk and placed it on my battery nothing. I asked the guy behind me (might have been a vortex/rotate guy) who had a much larger battery, no good. I really was not about to call a tow truck with a supercell factory sending tornado warned cells thru the area every 15 minutes(I had AAA Plus& cell service), of course I did’nt want to leave my car either with the passenger side window halfway down in the path of hail and tornado producing storm cells. At the same time I did’nt want to get left out their by myself and have a mile and a half wide wedge come around either. About a dozen vehicles were in the area but, they would all be gone as soon as the area cooled down. I joined Lucas from Salina who allowed me to join him for the rest of the evening. We headed North after a new cell we had been watching pass about half way to Hill City I swore I saw a fantastic tube on the ground, I figured we would get a break in the trees so we continued on but, we never re-acquired it(thier was a ‘fork’ in the road, the left side was dirt and saturated, the right was a county maintained gravel road). Saw alot of disorganized but, very dynamic movement along the still dry gravel and dirt roads. At Hill City it was getting dark and we decided to head back to I-70. Our radar was not updating for 20 minutes (actively working on the issue, just going thru a process of a reboot at the time). We knew thier was cell directly in our path with massive VIL’s and hail aloft. We were getting some nowcast information and decided to turn around if the hail got to large. We had a couple of small hits and found a hail shield(gas station) in the town of Wakeeny. The cell was tornado warned a tornado had been spotted, I had ‘heard’ the hail core passed the town to the South East but, given the hail I stepped out of the vehicle and looked around. I pointed at what looked like a rapidly rotating rainshaft (it was dark) to the SE (obscured by the gas station), all at once 4-5 cars full of people went running into the gas station, I felt horizontal hail it my back as I ran inside (the winds shifted from a E @ 10 to W @ 70+ suddenly as well (RFD, microburst, etc). Not sure what it was, we hearded in the tornado (refrigerator) shelter, as soon as we rounded the corner the windows blew out, and the station lost power (backup kicked in). No damage to the SUV(I was told, nickle sized) we also had another SUV blocking the hail from the West. I debated going back to the car but, storms were still going and even worse it was dark out. Hays was eventually was hit at 2am with storms, maybe a little pea sized hail, but, lots of lightning difficult to sleep thru.

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