Storms bring hail, strong winds, small tornadoes to Plains

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 destructive toadoes that many had worried about for days.

A rope toado brushed fields south of Wichita, Kansas, and another small twister touched down in southweste Indiana. As the sun went down on the weste 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 toadoes,” meteorologist Matt Mosier said as the forecast was taking shape.

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

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

As night fell, small twisters accompanied a line of thunderstorms as it rolled into Oklahoma City. Telltale power flashes from failing transformers pierced the twilight as another neighborhood lost power.

Later, in North Texas’ Grayson County, there were widespread reports of tree and roof damage. Several buildings in the small city of Whitesboro had “minor to extensive” damage but there were no reports of injuries, Whitesboro Police Lt. Jimmy Leverett said. Oncor, the main electricity provider for the region, counted about 36,000 customers without power in North Texas.

In Oklahoma, authorities were responding to reports of trees blown onto houses in the Tulsa area. No injuries were immediately reported.

A toado watch that had covered a large stretch of both states was allowed to expire after midnight.

In the days ahead of the storm, forecasters said a severe weather outbreak was possible Tuesday, perhaps including toadoes that could stay on the ground for miles.

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

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Bad weather is expected again Wednesday in Arkansas and Missouri, then later in the week in Oklahoma, Texas and Louisiana.

Ahead of Tuesday’s storms, businesses set out to protect their goods ahead of storms while school districts sent children home early, hoping to keep them safe.

George Eischen, 51, spent Tuesday moing moving vehicles off the lot at his Chevrolet dealership in the small town of Fairview, about 100 miles northwest of Oklahoma City. Eischen said he was lining the new vehicles “bumper to bumper” in the shop and even the floor of the lobby to protect them from the hail.

“We’ve never been hit by a toado here in town, amazingly,” Eischen said. “But yeah, we’ve had hail. And that’s the real enemy of the car dealer.”

Workers scrambled to protect planes at the Spirit of St. Louis Airport in Chesterfield, Missouri, when the winds picked up and the sky tued green.

“And I mean green green,” aviation director John Bales said. “It was pretty violent but luckily we didn’t have any substantial damage. We saw it coming and we were able to get most of the airplanes into hangars, so we didn’t have too much hail damage.”

Bill Schwindama, the emergency management chief for Marshall County, Kansas, said large hail damaged roofs and broke car windows near the town of Bremen, near Marysville. The hail started small about 5 p.m. but grew to as much as 4 inches in diameter, or about the size of a grapefruit.

Mid-Del Public Schools, in the Oklahoma City suburb of Midwest City, said in a statement that the safety of students and staff is a priority, noting that it reworked its toado safety plan three years ago after a twister killed seven schoolchildren in the neighboring suburb of Moore.

Associated Press writers Jill Bleed and Kelly P. Kissel in Little Rock, Arkansas; Jim Salter in St. Louis; and Bill Draper in Kansas City, Missouri; and Terry Wallace in Dallas contributed to this report.