MCCOOK, Neb. — It’s been a wild week of severe weather. Over the last 6 days, there have been more than 200 tornado reports across 15 states.
None of those tornadoes hit Colorado but a storm chaser from Denver ended up inside one of those tornadoes in McCook, Nebraska on Friday.
“You can hear it really starts to howl. At that moment you realize, I’m inside a tornado,” said Kory Poggenpohl.
Video shows 50 to 60 mile per hour winds spraying dirt and sticks across his truck as the twister developed right on his location.
“You do get scared you know, that’s your first reaction," said Poggenpohl. "Your first feeling is like okay what’s going to happen? Is the window going to get blown out, is it going to get underneath my truck, is it going to roll us over?”
An unbelievable and yet unintentional moment.
“Yeah definitely not what I expected. The time it went from being calm, to being in the middle of a tornado, happened in a matter of 90 seconds,” said Poggenpohl.
He said the storm did not show any of the classic signs that it was about to produce a tornado. There was no organized or pronounced wall cloud, and there was no tight rotation at the cloud base. A little swirl of dust suddenly appeared on the ground, and then the next thing he knew, a tornado was forming right on top of him.
“That’s not what I’m trying to do out there, or what other spotters are trying to do, or chasers. We want to be close, but not that close. It’s just a way to learn a lesson,” Poggenpohl said.
The lesson that every tornado forms differently and thunderstorms can change rapidly.
“You have to go into every situation expecting the unexpected every time,” said Poggenpohl.
There were other storm chasers caught off guard as well. Experienced and professional chaser Reed Timmer said he was 50 yards away from his armored vehicle when the ground circulation developed.
With no damage to his truck, he tracked down the blossoming tornado which would eventually double in size, reaching winds of 120 mph, but not before one thrill-seeker got the thrill of a lifetime.
“Wow, that really did happen. I did have an intercept with a tornado,” said Poggenpohl.
That tornado when on to hit a farmhouse northwest of McCook causing significant damage. The national weather service rated it an EF-2 and there were no injuries reported.
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