Van carrying six storm chasers directly hit, but no significant injuries reported.
Van carrying six storm chasers directly hit, but no significant injuries reported.
A white cone tornado was spotted near Crowell, Texas, about a two-hour drive north of Abilene, giving storm chasers and civilians alike a rare spectacle as it danced across a field of wind turbines. It was one of two tornadoes reported Wednesday across Texas and Oklahoma.
Multiple chasers, including AccuWeather’s Tony Laubach and his chasing partner Ed Grubb, followed the white cone tornado as its size waned and waxed, kicking up Texas red dirt and passing close to people’s homes and farmsteads.
“It was ghostly how it materialized and came out of the tree line. It was this bowl of dust, and suddenly the funnel appeared. And the sound, as close as we were, it was almost silent,” Grubb said.
The twister seemed to track right over one of the wind turbines, which escaped any significant damage.
“Watching it roll directly over those wind turbines, which are pretty big themselves, but how the tornado dwarfed them so much. And they survived! Fortunately a weak tornado,” Laubach said. “But all the colors of the landscape, the sky, the clouds, made for a beautifully eerie palette from Ma Nature.”
Storm Chaser Brandon Clement also tracked the twister near the windmills, and he shared footage of the tornado “eating” one of them, as he described the scene on Twitter.
The tornado twisted into Lockett, Texas, and caused damage to several structures. Among those affected by the storm were six people in a storm-chasing tour group whose van was directly hit by the tornado.
“We pulled up here, and we turned to try and face into the wind. … It spun us completely around, it turned us 90 degrees,” Charles Edwards, the operator of Cloud 9 Tours, told Clement. All of the passengers and guides in the van were reportedly safe, although Edwards showed Clement that one of his arms had been badly lacerated.
A chase tour got hit by wedge tornado in Lockett, TX @MattMapMaker and I stayed to help until police arrived at the scene. Always be extremely careful in severe weather situations. #txwx #wxtwitter @NWSNorman pic.twitter.com/sIoRaHRZwO
— Stefanie M (@KimChills) May 5, 2022
The National Weather Service had issued multiple warnings for the storm as it changed direction several times and eventually veered northward on its unusual path.
Light to moderate property damage could be seen across the northeastern part of Lockett, with parts of roofs torn off, trees felled and dents on cars hit by debris.
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Edited by Richard Pretorius and Matthew B. Hall
