May 25, 2008 Chase - Twin Cities Metro, Minnesota

Work in progress.  Having left KS, chasing all day in NE then driving home the prior day, I intercepted this monster up by Albertville, huge monster, putting down some huge hail.  It produced it’s first tornado around Coon Rapids while I was trying to keep up with the system on 610 a little bit to far South (or possibly fortunately a bit too far South you could also say), finally giving up just SW of Hugo.  I was on Country Rd J at that point and my Eastward route was blocked by a lake on the other side of I-35E and given the second cell right behind it and slightly to the South I decided to head South on I-35E to get out of it’s way before I-35E seized up (as they do with any decent storm).  Had I gone North on I-35E I most likely would have spotted the Hugo tornado.  The tornado ended up causing one fatality, and 9 injuries, I personally witnessed no reportable conditions.  Around the same time from out of nowhere a large F5 touched down in Parkersburg, IA producing something like 11 fatalities, and 90 injuries.  I need to look back on that date, and check any case studies that have popped up since then, I had just returned from 3 days in KS/NE but, I never saw that one coming that morning either that or I was just so focused on the Twin Cities for the couple days leading up to the event.  In any event I would have still stayed to ’spot’ for the homeland if I had futurevision.

**Will add stills, video, additional details sometime this winter**

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May 22nd - May 25th Kansas/Nebraska/Minnesota

I went chasing in Hays, KS on May 22nd and 23rd, Nebraska on the 24th, and did spotting locally on the 25th. I am going to try and get the 25th’s report up first but, have quite a bit of catch-up to do. I am having a bit of a challenge with my laptop, I dropped it on the early afternoon of the 22nd from about 2-3 feet which crushed the AC adaptor, I quickly ran to Radio Shack for a replacement (the adaptor jack was totalled) which works but, now I need to send it in for Jack Repair. I have copied all the stills and about 4 of 6 hours of video to a portable hard drive but, I do most of my editing on my laptop.

Put a video up from the 22nd but, you will need a fast computer to view it.  If your computer has difficulties try this low res compressed version.

TODO: 5/22 KS, 5/23 KS, 5/24 NE, 5/25 MN , 5/30 MN

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