Heavy hail pounds Great Plains; near-hurricane winds lash out
oklahoma city» Thunderstorms bearing hail as big as grapefruit and winds approaching hurricane strength lashed portions of the Great Plains on Tuesday.
The evening passed without the grand tornadoes that many had worried about for days, but a series of warnings were issued before midnight in central Texas and southern Oklahoma. There were no immediate reports of injuries
A rope tornado brushed fields south of Wichita, and another small twister touched down in southwestern Indiana. As the sun went down on the western prairie, the Storm Prediction Center had received reports of bad weather from Texas to Nebraska to West Virginia, but none of it deadly.
“It’s never straightforward when you’re sitting here talking about (predicting) large tornadoes,” meteorologist Matt Mosier said as the forecast was taking shape.
But it’s not like the weather wasn’t bad or scary. It was both. Four-inch-diameter hail fell in northern Kansas, northwest of Marysville, and winds hit 70 mph in Missouri and Texas as storms went through. Residents of Topeka, Kan., eyed the sky nervously during rush hour after forecasters warned that a supercell thunderstorm could produce a tornado at any moment.
As night fell, small twisters accompanied a line of thunderstorms as it rolled into Oklahoma City. Telltale power flashes from failing transformers pierced the twilight as another neighborhood lost power.
Forecasters posted a tornado watch for Oklahoma and Texas until midnight, saying the atmosphere could still be unsettled enough for tornadoes to develop.
“This is a particularly dangerous situation,” the Storm Prediction Center alerted in red type in an afternoon advisory. It uses such language on only about 7 percent of its tornado watches.