Hail, strong winds, small tornadoes hit Plains states

Associated Press

OKLAHOMA CITY

Thunderstorms bearing hail as big as grapefruit and winds approaching hurricane strength lashed portions of the Great Plains on Tuesday, but arrived without the grand tornadoes that many had worried about for days.

A rope tornado brushed fields south of Wichita, Kan., and another small twister touched down in southwestern Indiana. As the sun went down on the western prairie, the Storm Prediction Center had received reports of bad weather from Texas to Nebraska to West Virginia, but none of them deadly.

“It’s never straightforward when you’re sitting here talking about [predicting] large tornadoes,” meteorologist Matt Mosier said as the forecast was taking shape.

But it’s not as though the weather wasn’t bad or scary. It was both.

Hail 4 inches in diameter fell in northern Kansas, northwest of Marysville, and winds hit 70 mph in Missouri and Texas while storms went through. Residents of Topeka, Kan., eyed the sky nervously during rush hour after forecasters warned that a supercell thunderstorm could produce a tornado at any moment.

Forecasters posted a tornado watch for Oklahoma and Texas until midnight, saying the atmosphere could still be unsettled enough for tornadoes to develop.

“This is a particularly dangerous situation,” the Storm Prediction Center alerted in red type in an afternoon advisory. It uses such language on only about 7 percent of its tornado watches. Forecasters had predicted a 90 percent chance of tornadoes and said 80 percent could have winds above 111 mph in much of Oklahoma and northern Texas.