15 June 2022
Lincoln, NE to Topeka, KS
536 km
I got a great eight hours of sleep and was up at eight. I went for a short walk looking for a geocache but couldn’t find it. I left a Canada magnet on the light pole nearby.
At 10:30 we met for our briefing which wasn’t showing much for today but possible stuff in Colorado for tomorrow. We went to breakfast at Cracker Barrel but a couple of us had dessert instead.
The biscuits are the best I’ve ever tasted.
The store had the largest selection of root beer I’ve ever seen. I bought two.
From here we dropped down to Hallam, Nebraska which had been struck by a two and a half mile wide tornado on May 22, 2004. Chris went into a bar and asked around to see if there was a commemorative plaque and got into a long conversation with a woman, Lauraine Ebbers, who had ridden out the tornado in a beer cooler with a number of others. Today, there is a painting of each of them on the side of the cooler.
We couldn’t find the owner, so we couldn’t get into the store to see it but she showed us an aerial photo of the town after the tornado.
The tornado, the largest ever recorded until El Reno in 2013, touched the entire town from one side to the other.
The silos were destroyed and a line of train cars were toppled.
Amazingly enough, only one fatality was recorded. A woman, a cancer survivor, had not gone to her basement and was impaled. She was still alive when they found her but succumbed to her injuries.
The town was left unoccupied for a month while utilities were restored, and during this time, some people took advantage of the situation by towing away the damaged cars that didn’t belong to them. They weren’t stopped as the utility workers probably thought they were hired by locals to recover the cars.
Lauraine said her house survived but was damaged. The tornado had lifted the roof but didn’t take it. It warped the ceiling. Instead of fixing it, they just covered it with drywall.
A surprise for the next owner.
She pointed to the plaque and noted that a number of them had left town. One gentleman was working in Andover when it was struck by an F5 tornado in the 90s.
We thanked her for her explanation and headed out, driving south. We honestly weren’t really expecting anything major today but as we dropped south of the interstate, the cumulus tops were coming into view.
Chris booked rooms Topeka and we made for the last storm in a line of storms that were initiating after five in the afternoon.
We passed under the system and stopped when the lightning started up. I didn’t have my camera ready and missed some great shots.
The system was moving quite slow and on another stop, I was able to get a long time-lapse without the core moving out of the frame.
It spit out some nice bolts from time to time.
We zig-zagged on the gravel roads to keep the system in play, watching the sunset glow behind one of them.
We stopped once more to watch the lightning which became sheet lightning after a while, so we headed for the highway.
Took us an hour and a half to get to Topeka and we had to go under the core of the system en route. It was like a fireman was standing on the roof with a hose drenching the windshield from above. The driver in the lead van had the hardest time because he had no rear lights to follow.
We pulled into the Comfort Suites around 12:30 am, and needless to say, I was out cold.
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Chris Gulliskson’s roof cam