Digital Dave

Here is the path that the tornado took.  You can see that it snuck right over my apartment, which is crazy.  We had a bunch of snapped power lines, but the small buildings (and the buildings around it) came out fine.  Just a block to the right is a fraternity who had their roof blown right off of their house. Across the stret from that (in the purplish), the engineering complex received broken windows, and the roof from the fraternaty.

There’s no doubt that I, among a lot of other people, got extremely lucky.

It took 25 years. And I consider that pretty lucky for living in Kansas.

It was a relatively calm day, and even into the evening.  No rain, a little cloudy.  I was spending some time on Age of Conan when CNN busted in about some severe weather.  The meteorologist came on to report that a tornado just ransacked a boy scout camp up in Iowa.  He noted that it was going to be a wild night, and indeed that was.  Roughly 50 confirmed tornadoes, and Kansas happened to have a few of them.

One of them popped right on the I-70 (just SW of here), and the sirens immediately sounded.  It was, basically, out of nowhere.  My body immediately got a little warm, and the dog became alert.  I was lucky enough to be watching TV, so I knew exactly where it was.  I don’t have a basement, and considering that it came out of nowhere, I had to get somewhere, fast.  The sirens went off, and started to move to the KSU campus to hide out in the CIS building.  The sirens sounded, again, while I was parking my car.  I went inside and jumped onto the computer to watch some live stream of tornado coverage.  The tornado was heading straight toward Manhattan, KS — the first, since 1966.

The KSU campus ended up with a $20 Million estimate from damage, and the building I was in avoided any damage.

Many trees pulled from the ground, branches everywhere, leaves.  Buildings farther north than I was had some major damage. West of the city had around 30 houses flattened to their foundation.  Some of the commercial areas (Car dealership, lumber yard) were messed up pretty badly.

Overall, It was a pretty crazy night.

Down the street from my apt.

Campus Building

Aerial Photo of an area

Here is a really good tower cam video, if you’re into that sort of stuff.