My day started early, went to Danville with Deb to get some quilting supplies. By the time I got home about 1030am, Chris was ready to go and start heading to Galesburg.
On the trip, Chris worried about the heavy cloud cover, but felt better the closer we got to Galesburg. About 40 minutes from Galesburg, we had a major setback. We burned up our power inverter, which powers the laptop, camera, and mobile hotspot. We stopped and bought a power inverter, went out and tried it. It would not run the laptop off of the cigarette lighter plug, so had to hard wire it. We drove to the Farm King store, bought wire, connectors, and a few tools to hard wire to the battery-under the hood and in the front door. Due to short wires I had to splice each wire. Then another setback. The positive battery bolt would not come out. We drove to another auto part store, got some cleaning spray, and a few other things, and got the wired hooked up. Success, but fleeting. It was very touchy on the splices knocking out the inverter power. We were starved-hadnt eaten since 6am, it was about 4pm by now after 3 hours hard work. After eating and fueling up, went to Lowes, got wires that did not need to be spliced, and got the hookup done. We now had everything powered, and met some other chasers. The others went west, we stayed put for a bit longer. A resident from near the area stopped to talk to us, and asked if he could follow us. We said yes, and set up CB communications.
After some time looking at maps radar and surface observations, Chris wanted to go S of Monmouth and set up for a cell starting to fire off. We went just a little south of Monmouth and faced west. At first things didnt look too awful good, but then started noticing the cloud movement overhead. Lower and midlevel movement indicated there was pretty good shear. As we watched, a wall cloud was starting to form, so started heading east basically under the meso. We were watching the birth of a supercell. As we tracked it east activity started to grow more intense. We then started getting onto soft gravel roads, slowing our chase down. When we stopped at one point to get a good view, MesoOhio and another car of chasers passed us. The cloud action and structure right above us was amazing to watch! Coolest thing I've ever seen! As we continued east, the road network reached up and bit us. Just as the storm became tornado warned, with a massive wall cloud just ahead of us, we had to make a major jog north. Once we got going again east it was well ahead of us. We got on I74 and headed east at interstate speeds.
As we are driving, we kept getting reports of a large tornado on the ground, with Elmwood taking a hit. A little frustrated with our bad road luck. Just NW of Peoria, I could see ahead of us a lot of cars stopped on I74. I looked to my left(north) and saw what looked to be a stovepipe tornado on the ground. Chris and I argued, he felt it was too far back from the main circulation ahead of us, that this was just an updraft. What I saw was the E edge of the stovepipe cloud going straight up. I could not convince him to stay, he's the team leader, so we went on, straight down I74 through Peoria. Once we got past the river, we got on US 150 and headed north along the river. It was dark but could see the darkest area of the storm and what appeared to be the tornado (will have to check video). When we got to US150 and US24, we decided to turn around and go back south for another cell coming in.
We decided to head to Hopedale and started south on county rd 9 once we got there. We were in driving blinding rain for the last 10 miles of this trip. A couple miles south of Hopedale, Chris had me stop, he didnt like what he was seeing. The TVS was just to our west moving SE and couldn't see 5 feet with the rain, a very intense HP supercell. Just the action of the rain made him nervous, wasnt all one direction, we were close. We stopped a few minutes, when he felt it was safe, we moved towards Atlanta IL for another tornadic cell just south of this one.
Just as we came into Atlanta, the sirens started, had blinding rain, and was in the middle of town. We didnt want to get caught in Atlanta in a tornado--too much debris- the tvs was close. We went a few miles SE but Chris decided to break off the chase-too dangerous. Had HP supercells, tornadic, and blinding rain, no visibility.
Finally about 1am, we made it home. I was exhausted, having been up for 19 hours, either driving or fixing stuff. Overall, a great day, possibly 2 tornadoes on video (will check), and watched a supercell birth. It does come bittersweet though, knowing many towns in the midwest took heavy damage, some with injuries or deaths. The good thing was, Chris did put in a developing wall cloud report early in the genesis, possibly (?) giving other spotters/chasers time to get better views and earlier warnings as it rapidly went tornadic before Elmwood.
Sunday, June 6, 2010
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