The rest of story

You've seen the damage in the previous post, but here are the details:

• Hundreds of excellent hail dents - hard to take a good picture of
• He has 6 external driving lamps - 3 now busted (so much for the 23 year warranty)
• Paint peeled off the driving lamps
• My Garmin GPS 18 puck that sits on the roof - smashed, so at the moment, there is no APRS location reporting (check the last update on the tracking page to see where that happened) or we might have spotternetwork running on the laptop
  
• Windshield moulding busted
• Peeled the paint off the roof rack

• Did NOT break the windshield - all luck in that
• Everything else seems fine

Then again, how can someone who is hired to storm chase NOT have dimples in his car. :)

From the beginning, we watched this storm build from SE of Wichita Falls. We had time to kill, so we drove over into it and just got rained on. Then, the hail games started. Ron wanted me to drive through the core of the storm to see what the hail was really like.

The first time, it was pee sized. By about the 5th time, it was quarter sized. A few hours later (now dark) and driving by GPS and radar, it was huge. Possibly tennis ball. We still need to check the video to see what it was.

As it plays out, there was 1 storm building as it should (and how Ron predicted) - right on schedule. We zig zagged our way around county roads and found a place on the north side of the storm where we could watch the rotation and even captured a few pics of it. We could hear the hail coming from behind us with little bits falling. Our pictures do show a small funnel starting to form.

As it started to get bigger, we jumped back into the car and headed east. Now, we are stuck and just getting hammered on by hail while we worked our way back to the SE in order to get south of the rotation and down to a highway that we could catch up to it with. We spent the next hour following it, but never saw it dropped to the ground.

Just before it started to collapse (and the number 2 cell following it), we headed north back into the core area. The sun had just set and of course it was getting dark. We are on a dirt/gravel road headed east with the storm and Ron carefully watching the Baron radar which has our position plotted on the screen. The wind was howling and it was really really pouring rain.

I think that it was shortly after that that we were sitting in the notch of the storm, Ron in a very very calm voice saying, it might be good if you backup a little. I guess he didn't want me to put it in the ditch. (Didn't I see that scene in Twister -- but there was no bridge near by to hide in). It blew by and we headed back to St. Jo Texas. Now, the tornado sirens are going off and we decided to top up on gas.

The 2nd storm is bearing down on St. Jo and from the track we can see, it will pass just south of the town. Several people stop to talk to us and everyone who owns a car they care about is parked in gas stations or car washes. Ron talks to a Lady to let her know she actually moved closer to the storm and says she is safer back home. We think her brand new Buick was only weeks old.

We paced the storm for about 5 or 6 hours, calling it quits near Sherman Texas when one of the cells totally collapsed - on us - in about 100mph shear winds and a ton of rain. I will post some pictures later as well as some video on my web site.

As I write this, we are headed into Longview TX and might have to head over to Louisianna for our last intercept of this trip. It beats driving over to Amarillo TX or back into Oklahoma, both of which are dealing with blizzard warnings and over a foot of snow. And me with only my Teva's newly acquired from Mountain Coop just before I left.