Photogs stormchasing in Kansas/Oklahoma...

[woodsiecam]

Everyone OK? After the wedge that went through Greensburg on Friday, I heard there were at least two more wedge tornadoes that hit central Kansas on Saturday, as well as one that hit Sweetwater, Oklahoma.

Use your best judgement out there. Don't let the desk put you in a bad position with these storms popping up. Sounds like Sunday is gonna be rough, too.

Stay safe.

[woodsiecam]

Hoping you photogs are ok. From the reports, looks like 15 or more are injured from Saturday's storms. Anyone have any accounts from the field?

[herter857]

I watched these storms build up from Hays and these things were huge. If you live in the mid-west you get a since of when you know something like this will happen. There were alot of us that had that sense this weekend. I remember the Hoisington Tornado but this is something I'll never forget.

Anyone have a count of how many tornadoes actually were besides the big one on Friday night?

[Canonman]

Anyone have a count of how many tornadoes actually were besides the big one on Friday night?

I was looking at the SPC storm report data for yesterday, May 5th. There were a total of 92 tornado reports in the log. This includes OK, KS, SD, NE, IA. I can't remember a severe wx outbreak this bad in the years I've been on the planet.

cm

[KsPhotog]

I was in Greensburg all day Saturday. We got out of town about 5 minutes ahead of another tornado. We were in the middle of live shots and everyone knew we were there, but no one from the station bothered to tell us to get out. Nice.
Passed lots of storm chasers going toward town as we were getting out. It was another rain wrapped tornado, that are almost impossible to see coming. Another crew from our station got some video of it from a different direction.

Going back tomorrow for the clean up and the residents first look at what's left of their town, which isn't much. I've covered a lot of tornados and this is the worst damage I've ever seen.

[BNVN]

I was playing News Desk Monkey back in MN for my company this weekend. Most of my guys busted on Friday and ended up all over the map. Saturday we had crews on several of the storms and CNN and TWC are currently showing a couple of our videos.

Here is one of the videos that shows the tornadoes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmv72Xqx9fI

The other was some flooding in Great Bend.

If you want to track the chasers in the field over radar, check out this software from www.swiftwx.com You can watch the chasers in the field reporting their positions via gps

[photogguy]

I was in Greensburg all day Saturday. We got out of town about 5 minutes ahead of another tornado. We were in the middle of live shots and everyone knew we were there, but no one from the station bothered to tell us to get out. Nice.


I hope you read them the riot act, professionally of course.

There is NO excuse for that to have happened. You rely on them to watch your back, to keep you informed of incoming weather.

You can't just let this lapse in judgment slide, or else it'll keep happening until someone gets hurt, or gets dead.

[wutang]

Yo ksphotog,
One of our reporters told Anne (your reporter for the day) to get out because a storm was going to hit about the same area. Plus officials in Greensburg came up to all of us and told people storms were going to hit and we were in the same spot for our live shots(except for KAKE). Sorry if you weren't told personally. We had twelve people we were trying to account for while trying to get out. It was a hectic moment for everyone and we all have weather teams that did not bother to tell the crews a storm cell was coming at us. We found out two minutes before it hit by one of our engineers not by our weather guys.

Sorry if you felt like we let you down but I think we were all in the same situation and lucky the nader was about five miles off of our location. I wish it could have played differently but it dident. I think we all learned a valuable lesson and know the danger we put ourselves in when we cover storms. In retrospect I dont blame anyone but myself because mother nature is a bit@h, and does not care about anyone when she gets angry.

[KsPhotog]

My point was that none of our stations bothered to let the crews in the field know they were in the path of a tornado. We all had crews there since the night before.
They knew we were there and didn't bother to warn us until we called in. I knew we were in a storm warning, but not a tornado warning.
That's what I was upset about.

[pre-set]

I hope you read them the riot act, professionally of course.

There is NO excuse for that to have happened. You rely on them to watch your back, to keep you informed of incoming weather.

You can't just let this lapse in judgment slide, or else it'll keep happening until someone gets hurt, or gets dead.



Our desk trolls do the same thing. There could be on on-coming wall cloud with more lightning than a bad Frankenstein movie and they wouldn't call us to give us a heads-up.They even have a dedicated doppler monitor on the desk and still don't call us.


This spring I've decided to just start dropping shots w/o warning or notice every time someone DOESN'T give us a heads-up call. F'em.