"You Chase Storms?" Part 2

            Okay, I lied. I am not going to get to what I said I would elaborate on in this post.

           

Saturday, June 7^th, 2008. I was working as a lifeguard at a small hotel in the Dells. My hours were 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. I hadn’t seen a soul in the indoor or outdoor waterpark, which was surprising since it was rather warm and humid. It was less than an hour into my shift when I heard the tornado sirens going off in Lake Delton. I knew it wasn’t a test, as they didn’t do those on Saturdays. I also knew it wasn’t the fire warning siren because the tornado siren is a steady on three-minute tone, while the fire siren is a wavering up and down tone.

I went inside and asked the lone front desk clerk if she had a weather radio. She said no, and asked why. I replied that the tornado sirens were going off in Lake Delton. She called their sister hotel on the other side of town and was told they didn’t know anything about it. I went back outside and looked west. The sun was out. It was hot. Conditions were definitely right for storms and tornadic weather. I knew mom and dad were not home; I don’t remember what they had going on that day, so I couldn’t call them. Since my brother lived two counties west, I called him and asked him to check the radar for me because we had tornado sirens going off but it was sunny.

“Where are you?” He asked me worriedly, with a stern voice. “Tell me where you are RIGHT NOW.” I replied that I was at work at a hotel on the Parkway. He says, “Find shelter NOW. There’s a red hot tornado-warned cell just to your west, near Elroy, and it’s headed right for the Dells.”

I told him I would call him back after it passed so he knew I was okay. I turned off the waterslide, then ran inside and told the clerk that we needed to get everyone into the basement if they had a basement or into the hallways, as there was a bad storm with a possible tornado approaching. Well… she freaked out more than I had ever seen anyone freak out, got on the phone to the other hotel, then unlocked the basement door, ran into the restaurant attached to the hotel lobby and put me in charge of getting all those customers into the basement as she ran to alert guests in the other three buildings that housed the hotel rooms. She returned saying she could not find anyone but one guest and he refused to come to the basement. Right after she got inside and I locked the door, it began to downpour. Raining sheets and it came out of nowhere. I get the large metal roll door closed and proceed to the basement to ride the storm out with 45 strangers of all ages and a freaked out front desk clerk. I kept telling her that she needed to calm down so she did not freak out the patrons, especially the children.

The restaurant off the hotel lobby was a pizza buffet, and some of the patrons had brought their plates to the basement with them and just kept eating, as if nothing was going on.

During the storm, one of my supervisors came to pick me up. I left the freaked out clerk there in the basement with all those guests, but she told me to go. I was crammed into the front seat of his Chevy S-10 pickup truck with him and the other lifeguard from the sister hotel they had come from. Traffic was horribly backed up (as it always is in the Dells when it rains), there was about a foot of water at the bottom of the hill by Noah’s Ark, signs were blown over, there was small and medium tree debris everywhere, power was out, phone lines were jammed.

Downtown was even worse. Taste of the Dells event was going on but all the tents and canopies had blown away or were shredded from the wind. Larger trees and billboards were blown over. The Park Restaurant sign was shattered and in pieces across Broadway and into Bowman Park across the street. Traffic was bumper to bumper. By the time I was dropped off at home on the east side of downtown, the sun was out again and chainsaws could be heard.

I do not believe there was a confirmed tornado that day (that would take some more research) but people were claiming there were three funnel clouds sighted: one near the airport, one near exit 85, and another over Mt. Olympus. But I’ve never seen straight line winds do this:

I suited up in my rain pants, boots, and work gloves and headed to my friend’s place down the street from my cabin. I assisted them in moving some large trees from the alley behind their house then headed up by the park. Everyone appeared to be okay had assistance so they didn’t need ours, and it was probably an hour or so before I could get through to anyone on the phone to let them know I was okay. So I returned home, grabbed my camera and jumped in my car to go inspect the damage.

The following night, I was posted to security detail at a different hotel on the Parkway. It had been raining on and off all day. Around 0230 on Monday morning, dispatch asked an officer to check the water levels on Lake Delton because she had a resident on the phone stating the water was reaching his waterfront home. About 0430 Monday morning, they began recruiting volunteers to help fill sand bags. At 0630, they began evacuating homes around the lake. At 0658, two minutes before the end of my shift, the power goes out. I didn’t think anything of it. I went home and went straight to bed.

I woke up and headed up to my parent’s house. I was only there a short period of time when mom turned on the weather channel. I looked up to see video of the earth underneath a house on Lake Delton wash away and the house float away and drain into the Wisconsin River, along with the rest of the lake. At 0658 that morning when the power went out at work is when the earth around the lake eroded and our beloved Lake Delton drained away like a bathtub into the Wisconsin River within a couple of hours.

The summer of 2008 was rather interesting here in the Wisconsin Dells area. Tourists believed that the Dells was “gone” after it was wiped out by a tornado then the lake drained and flooded away the rest of the Dells. Another rumor was that the Lake Delton Dam broke, but that was not true either as the dam was intact and south of the point where the lake broke through and drained. The Tommy Bartlett’s Ski, Sky, and Stage Show just turned into a Stage show as he sent his water skiers to Florida for the summer. The freeway was closed in several areas downriver as the water reached the highway. Working security at the lakeside hotels was slightly unnerving looking out into a scary, dark mud pit instead of the small waves reflecting in the moon light. Cleanup commenced in the lake and some old artifacts believed to be from Al Capone’s days were unburied from the mud.

But, we returned. The road was rebuilt and a small park and historical marker were erected in that spot where the lake breached. The spillway on the creek that flows into the lake was opened up and the lake was refilled by the following summer. Granted, I didn’t really get to chase these except for some cool pictures afterwards, but they were probably the craziest disasters to hit and have an effect closest to home. 

"You Chase Storms?"

If you had told me when I was a kid that I was going to grow up to enjoy thunderstorms and tornadoes, I would have laughed in your face. I was petrified of storms… along with everything else. If there was even a slight chance of storms during the overnight hours, I would drag my sleeping bag down to my parent’s bedroom and sleep on the floor next to their bed. Until one morning Dad woke up and tripped over me. Then I graduated to sleeping on the couch in the living room on stormy nights. There was just something about being further away from the lightning (my bedroom was upstairs) and in the middle of the house that made it better.

Also, it’s not like we lived in Tornado Alley. The only tornado I remember hitting our county in my lifetime wiped out the town approximately 25 miles to our north on a Saturday night in late August in the mid 90’s. It was the weekend after school started my 6^th grade year. I remember that Dad was at work, Mom was home with my brother and I and we were watching Walker, Texas Ranger on Channel 7 when the storm warnings started coming across the scroller. At about 9:40 p.m. we went into the basement with the radio and police scanner, listening to the local radio station that always thought their listeners had a sense of humor because they would always play Garth Brooks’ song “The Thunder Rolls” during a storm. They were talking to the firefighters who had set up spotting along the river for the best view of the western sky and then we heard a deputy say on the scanner that a water heater just landed on the highway in front of his squad car. I was terrified, because that’s when I started hearing noises upstairs and thought the tornado was ripping our house apart, but it was just Dad coming home from work and joining us in the basement. An elderly couple died in that tornado, and to this day, the foundation where their house stood is still there. I do remember being upset because my brother got out of school for two days to go assist with the cleanup, but only the high school kids got to do that. Back then, us 6th graders were still in the elementary school so we were considered “too little” to help with cleanup.

Our neighbor was a single Mom of one, and did not like being home alone during storms, so she would always send her son over when a storm was imminent and ask if we wanted to take cover in her basement. We usually would go over there; her basement was much nicer, less scary, and had fewer creepy crawly things than ours did.

I do not recall what piqued my interest. I know it had to be sometime between the Big Flats tornado in the mid-90’s and summer of 2003, when I lived in downtown Dells. I got caught in a nice storm in the early a.m. hours and instead of taking cover, ran inside to fetch my video camera and stood under the overhang while the sky turned green, the wind whipped the trees, and the rain deluged. I remember telling my Dad in the truck one day that I would like to watch a tornado from a distance once, just to say I had seen one, and then run in and help with search and rescue or cleanup. That never happened. Our church association had a Disaster Relief team that I wanted to get involved with, but again, adolescence and funding prevented that.

Even the movie “Twister” scared me. I still cannot watch it alone after dark. It’s not like I saw that movie and was like “cool… let’s go chase tornadoes!” I was along the lines of everyone else thinking those people were insane.

I started going to National Weather Service (NWS) Storm Spotter training around 2002 or 2003. I seriously do not remember what made me go from being terrified of storms to chasing them, but I’m kind of a weird chaser. I don’t even really consider myself a chaser. I’m definitely a spotter. I look at the radar or out the window and say “yep…it’s gonna storm…” I know how to read radar and the hazardous weather outlooks but not all the other weather data put out by the Storm Prediction Center (SPC).

It may have been the invention of digital photography that did it for me… the capability to view pictures immediately and delete them if they don’t turn out, instead of waiting until they’re developed to discover I wasted an entire roll of film on crappy pictures. Because I would definitely say that I’m a weather photographer. I take more pictures of sunsets, cloud formations, and scenery than of anything else. Yet I will still be the one running for cover when a storm is approaching, or planning ahead and grabbing Squeex and my laptop and driving 45 miles north to the safety of my parent’s basement. Even my Mom will tell you that she’ll drive while I take pictures if we were able to chase storms, and Dad is trying to figure out how to make the motorcycle safe for chasing. It costs money for gas and food on the road to chase and I definitely don’t have an armored tank I drive right into the heart of the storm like Sean Casey or Reed Timmer or like the movie “Into the Storm.” I spot and chase locally and refer what I see back to the NWS and my neighbors, who constantly ask me how bad the storms are going to be. I always get a good laugh out of that… but I’m usually pretty close to accurate, except for this last time, which I’ll elaborate on in my next post.