Tornado producing storm slams through area
This is one wicked spring storm. The metro Quad Cities area was spared the brunt, but those in the path of its core (shown as a pink spot) got hammered as it traveled east southeast carving a trail from Iowa City to Muscatine, across Mercer county to Galesburg and on to the Peoria area. 14 tornados were reported spotted in Iowa alone.
Downtown Iowa City got absolutely blasted by one or more tornadoes, with structural damage, a church destroyed, reports of traffic light poles bend in half and cars destroyed.
Muscatine had enormous size hail and tornados, Illinois City reported up to 2 inches of hail covering the ground.
KWQC showed this picture contributed by Jessi Freers of Muscatine, Iowa showing some large hailstones.
But other pictures sent in and shown on KWQC but not available as yet on their site showed hailstones the size of baseballs! (yes, they were that large, only 7 fit on a large plate)
Did any readers find themselves in the path of this thing? Tell us what it was like. What sort of damage have you seen or experienced. What was your experience like?
posted by The Inside Dope @ 4/13/2006
5 comments
5 Comments:
I know from talking to people back there tonight that Happy Joes, a handful of sorority/fraternity houses on Washington, the Dairy Queen on Riverside, Wal Mart and Menards are all heavily damaged.
The 110+ year old building I work in went unscathed. I was even logged in and working without any interruption. :) I'll try and remember to take my camera tomorrow and if I get anything good dope I'll email it.
Wow, global warming sucks.
Thanks for the pix. I'm on the west side of town, and we were in the downstairs bathroom listening to that dude on KWWL saying various towns were "under the gun" about fifteen times a minute, so we didn't actually hear much about anything except the Wal-Mart sighting. That's about 1 mile south of us. Meanwhile our 2-year-old was telling/begging us that no tornadoes would come into our house because our house was much too strong. We told her she was right, and hoped.
No hail or wind damage here except to spring flowers. Hope all who had been trapped by debris are out safely.
Please do Tiz... I'd appreciate that.
Anyone else with any shots related to the storm, feel free to send them along as well.
I made it to Iowa City today and looked at some of the destruction. I got some pictures (not many, more on that in a second) but they're not really that great - mainly pics of uprooted trees and cars that lost their windows. The Daily Iowan and Press Citizen websites both have a ton of pictures that are better than anything I could have taken this morning.
Looking at the damage was surreal. There's something really messed up about the National Guard directing traffic on the way to work. I took a 6-block stroll to look and came back feeling guilty for going much less bringing my camera along. Some of the residents were outright hostile to the many of us were milling about and I can't say I blame them. This may sound bad, but the one good thing about the houses I saw damaged/destroyed was they were mostly houses divided up into apartments or greek houses. Most of the kids living in those places only had what they brought up with them to school. In other words, I think it would have been worse if the 20-30 houses I saw damaged today belonged to families who had lived there forever and had all of their earthly possessions in the houses. There were a lot of parents up there helping already. Either way, I felt really bad going through there to look.
The University itself had little/no damages and could have been open for business today. I am just glad that nobody was killed or seriously hurt.
Thanks Tiz.... I put the links you mentioned at the bottom of the post.
Post a Comment
<< Home