Local Storm Chaser's Harrowing Encounter with Moore, OK Tornado

Danny Neal can scratch seeing an EF5 tornado off his list. The Evergreen Park storm chaser came within a mile of the "finger of God" twister before it entered the western section of Moore, OK, on Monday afternoon.

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“I’m seen many EF4s and but never an EF5. I guess I can cross it off my list,” Neal said via phone, on the drive home back to Chicago on Tuesday afternoon. “It was definitely the strongest and the deadliest tornado that I've ever seen.”

Neal and two storm-chasing buddies hit the road Friday night, after computer models indicated favorable conditions for tornadoes up and down the plains states throughout the weekend.

After driving through the night, Neal and his friends ended up in western Kansas near the town of Great Bend, about 200 miles north of Wichita. They spent Saturday chasing and documenting three tornadoes in the middle of nothing, including one that lasted for 25 minutes, blowing across an empty field.

“Most of them only last a minute or two and develop in isolated areas," he said.  “The longer-lived one damaged a couple of houses.”

Sunday's chase led them to the Kansas-Oklahoma border, where they watched another twister form in the middle of a field next to them. The tornado didn't do any damage.

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Spending Sunday night in Ponca City, OK, about 90 miles north of Oklahoma City, they headed in that direction the next morning after analyzing radar data on their laptop mounted inside their SUV.

“There were subtle things,” Neal said. “We noticed where a dry line and cold front all met west of the city, and there was a lot of moisture pulling into the area.”

Arriving in the Oklahoma City-metro area around 1 p.m. Monday, they met up at the apartment of Oklahoma-storm chaser Ben Holcomb, whose footage of the Moore tornado was featured on CNN.

Making some final adjustments to their game plan, Neal and his friends decided to sit just south of the Oklahoma City-metro area.

“We wanted to have the back roads available to us,” Neal said. “We started noticing a storm blowing up to the west of us.”

At 2:04 p.m. there was nothing on the radar; by 2:25 p.m. the fast-developing super cell was moving into its mature life cycle.

“It started from little, agitated cumulus clouds to a full-fledged super cell in 25 minutes, which is extraordinarily explosive,” Neal said. “It blew up on the west side of the metro area and it rapidly organized. All the ingredients were right in that spot and the storm utilized them.”

The storm chasers were actually sandwiched between two super cells to the north and south. They debated which storm to go after.

"Usually you want to go to the south because the unimpeded inflow of warm air feeds it and the south storm usually kills off the north storm,” Neal said. “[Monday afternoon] it happened in reverse. The north storm killed off the south.”

When they saw how organized the storm was on the radar around 2:40 p.m., about 45 minutes before it hit Moore, OK, they turned back north.

“It was very organized and well structured,” Neal said. “There was a big wall cloud and a miso cyclone on the radar with a huge rotating updraft. Visually, we could see it in the distance.”

With the southern sun at their backs they barreled through Newcastle about five miles from Moore, moments before it, too, got hit, when they caught their first glimpse of it: a huge, 1.3-mile-wide monster rolling across a black and blue northern sky. It looked hideous.

“Visually it was the widest and most powerful looking tornado I’ve seen,” Neal said, whose documented about 85 twisters. “It was the most terrifying roar I’ve heard. It makes me sick to my stomach to think about it.”

“It was sounded like everything you could imagine, like a freight train on steroids,” Neal said.

Check here for information on how to help the Oklahoma tornado victims.

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