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American Morning
Tornado Hits Kansas
Aired May 05, 2003 - 08:02 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
HEIDI COLLINS, CNN ANCHOR: We are going to move on right now, in fact, to one of the larger tornadoes that touched down in Leavenworth County, Kansas.
Our Ed Lavandera is there. He's with two people whose home was hit by the tornado -- hi, Ed.
ED LAVANDERA, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Hi, Heidi.
Well, we've had a little bit of a change of plans because the of police are working in this area have kind of kept us away from one of the homes we wanted to show you. But we were talking to a woman named Dorothea Fears (ph), who lives in a home just over here that had been pretty much slashed in half. And I was just talking to her. She's actually walking in the hills behind her house right now, looking for her belongings.
But she just told us, told me a little while ago that the home where she would, she would have been here yesterday when this tornado hit, but for the first time in her life she said she had treated herself to a pedicure yesterday, and she left and wasn't home when she hit.
But everything collapsed in on the basement of her home here, one of the homes you see here slashed in half, and she's missing her dog and what surprises her most is that the area that she normally has assigned to hide, to seek shelter from a tornado completely collapsed in there. So she's extremely grateful this morning that she wasn't home here.
We've talked to several of the residents who are in these homes. This is in Kansas City, Kansas, a subdivision. As people are going through their belongings here, trying to make sense of what exactly happened, they say one of the residents here described it as a -- of course, we have several people who described it as a, hearing a loud freight train coming through here. But one of the more descriptive descriptions of this tornado, someone's describing it as a huge boulder rolling down the street, that that's what it sounds like.
The tornado kind of cut -- if you see here from my left -- across the hill here, up over this hill toward the right. And what we've seen is a lot of splintered trees and a lot of the -- this is a row of eight homes and three are completely demolished. And we talked to one of the residents that lives at the end down there and they say everything inside their home is fine. In fact, several of the residents along this street here slept here last night -- Heidi.
COLLINS: Unbelievable.
Well, obviously, the cleanup is going to take quite some time and be very challenging.
Now, what about power and water where you are? That always makes it so much worse without power.
LAVANDERA: Well, the residents here say they've been without power since the storms, a few minutes before the storm hit here yesterday, and they still don't have anything back up at this point. We have seen crews here in this neighborhood working already to kind of try to help reestablish here. But mostly the focus here is on cleanup at this point.
COLLINS: Ed, do the folks there that you've been able to speak with, did any of them tell you how they felt about the warning and how much time they had to take shelter?
LAVANDERA: Well, they said there was some warning. In fact, one of the residents we spoke to down here at the end of the street, they said that everything looked really calm right before the storm hit and that they had been watching TV and that the storm was probably about five or six miles away and that's when they decided to go into the basement.
But one of the gentlemen we spoke with said everything looks so calm that he had actually taken the trash out. He just thought it looked like a normal day, just went about his normal business and then a few minutes later the storm hit. So it was a sign of just how quickly things here changed.
COLLINS: Any idea how long that time was from when it was nice and calm to just complete havoc?
LAVANDERA: Actually, it was just a matter of minutes. The residents that we've spoken with say they turned on the TV and were watching the weather reports here from the local news stations and they said that the storm was just a few miles away. And then all of a sudden, things here changed dramatically.
COLLINS: All right, very good.
Ed Lavandera in Leavenworth County.
Thanks so much.
You know, they always say, I mean growing up in Minnesota, and you probably, too, in Ohio, you hear that -- or you see just that calm and maybe a little bit of green outside.
HEMMER: Yes, the green skies.
COLLINS: And it's the calm before the storm.
HEMMER: Yes. This is some of the videotape you're seeing today. And you can anticipate a lot more home videotape popping up throughout the morning today, just based on the sheer size and the geographical area where this storm covered.
Chad reported earlier at least 83 reports of tornado sightings from last evening, which is juts astounding. And if you look at the map behind Chad as we go down to the CNN Center, the red dots indicate trouble from last night -- Chad, good morning again.
CHAD MYERS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, guys.
And I have them as dots. As you know, some of these things were on the ground for 30 miles. So we could stretch them out, not just the dot here, but from Kansas City all the way down to Joplin, obviously, back through the Ozarks and into Memphis and Nashville. We still have weather this morning to talk about.
In fact, still tornado watches in effect, as you indicated. Those watches are going to continue all the way through the morning hour and a brand new tornado watch just issued for northern Georgia and northern Alabama, as a line of storms now running through parts of Tennessee will be moving into northern Alabama and northern Georgia, Memphis, Indianapolis, Chicago, Detroit. You are not out of the woods.
Yes, it's raining up here and what we call it, wrecking the air mass for now. Storms like nice sunshine, heat. They want to be hot. They want to go up like a hot air balloon. We can't go up up here, because it's nice and cold. Temperatures are only in the '50s and '60s. But later in the day, the sun will come back out. Obviously you see the back edge of the rain right there and as that sun comes back out, we'll pop more storms up again. Expecting probably a couple dozen tornadoes today, not the 83 that we saw yesterday. But that's certainly enough to make problems all over the country -- Heidi.
You can already see the big red boxes here popping up across parts of the upper Midwest and also down across the Southeast.
We'll keep you up to date on where they're going this afternoon, too -- back to you.
COLLINS: All right, Chad, thanks so much.
TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com
Aired May 5, 2003 - 08:02 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
HEIDI COLLINS, CNN ANCHOR: We are going to move on right now, in fact, to one of the larger tornadoes that touched down in Leavenworth County, Kansas.
Our Ed Lavandera is there. He's with two people whose home was hit by the tornado -- hi, Ed.
ED LAVANDERA, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Hi, Heidi.
Well, we've had a little bit of a change of plans because the of police are working in this area have kind of kept us away from one of the homes we wanted to show you. But we were talking to a woman named Dorothea Fears (ph), who lives in a home just over here that had been pretty much slashed in half. And I was just talking to her. She's actually walking in the hills behind her house right now, looking for her belongings.
But she just told us, told me a little while ago that the home where she would, she would have been here yesterday when this tornado hit, but for the first time in her life she said she had treated herself to a pedicure yesterday, and she left and wasn't home when she hit.
But everything collapsed in on the basement of her home here, one of the homes you see here slashed in half, and she's missing her dog and what surprises her most is that the area that she normally has assigned to hide, to seek shelter from a tornado completely collapsed in there. So she's extremely grateful this morning that she wasn't home here.
We've talked to several of the residents who are in these homes. This is in Kansas City, Kansas, a subdivision. As people are going through their belongings here, trying to make sense of what exactly happened, they say one of the residents here described it as a -- of course, we have several people who described it as a, hearing a loud freight train coming through here. But one of the more descriptive descriptions of this tornado, someone's describing it as a huge boulder rolling down the street, that that's what it sounds like.
The tornado kind of cut -- if you see here from my left -- across the hill here, up over this hill toward the right. And what we've seen is a lot of splintered trees and a lot of the -- this is a row of eight homes and three are completely demolished. And we talked to one of the residents that lives at the end down there and they say everything inside their home is fine. In fact, several of the residents along this street here slept here last night -- Heidi.
COLLINS: Unbelievable.
Well, obviously, the cleanup is going to take quite some time and be very challenging.
Now, what about power and water where you are? That always makes it so much worse without power.
LAVANDERA: Well, the residents here say they've been without power since the storms, a few minutes before the storm hit here yesterday, and they still don't have anything back up at this point. We have seen crews here in this neighborhood working already to kind of try to help reestablish here. But mostly the focus here is on cleanup at this point.
COLLINS: Ed, do the folks there that you've been able to speak with, did any of them tell you how they felt about the warning and how much time they had to take shelter?
LAVANDERA: Well, they said there was some warning. In fact, one of the residents we spoke to down here at the end of the street, they said that everything looked really calm right before the storm hit and that they had been watching TV and that the storm was probably about five or six miles away and that's when they decided to go into the basement.
But one of the gentlemen we spoke with said everything looks so calm that he had actually taken the trash out. He just thought it looked like a normal day, just went about his normal business and then a few minutes later the storm hit. So it was a sign of just how quickly things here changed.
COLLINS: Any idea how long that time was from when it was nice and calm to just complete havoc?
LAVANDERA: Actually, it was just a matter of minutes. The residents that we've spoken with say they turned on the TV and were watching the weather reports here from the local news stations and they said that the storm was just a few miles away. And then all of a sudden, things here changed dramatically.
COLLINS: All right, very good.
Ed Lavandera in Leavenworth County.
Thanks so much.
You know, they always say, I mean growing up in Minnesota, and you probably, too, in Ohio, you hear that -- or you see just that calm and maybe a little bit of green outside.
HEMMER: Yes, the green skies.
COLLINS: And it's the calm before the storm.
HEMMER: Yes. This is some of the videotape you're seeing today. And you can anticipate a lot more home videotape popping up throughout the morning today, just based on the sheer size and the geographical area where this storm covered.
Chad reported earlier at least 83 reports of tornado sightings from last evening, which is juts astounding. And if you look at the map behind Chad as we go down to the CNN Center, the red dots indicate trouble from last night -- Chad, good morning again.
CHAD MYERS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, guys.
And I have them as dots. As you know, some of these things were on the ground for 30 miles. So we could stretch them out, not just the dot here, but from Kansas City all the way down to Joplin, obviously, back through the Ozarks and into Memphis and Nashville. We still have weather this morning to talk about.
In fact, still tornado watches in effect, as you indicated. Those watches are going to continue all the way through the morning hour and a brand new tornado watch just issued for northern Georgia and northern Alabama, as a line of storms now running through parts of Tennessee will be moving into northern Alabama and northern Georgia, Memphis, Indianapolis, Chicago, Detroit. You are not out of the woods.
Yes, it's raining up here and what we call it, wrecking the air mass for now. Storms like nice sunshine, heat. They want to be hot. They want to go up like a hot air balloon. We can't go up up here, because it's nice and cold. Temperatures are only in the '50s and '60s. But later in the day, the sun will come back out. Obviously you see the back edge of the rain right there and as that sun comes back out, we'll pop more storms up again. Expecting probably a couple dozen tornadoes today, not the 83 that we saw yesterday. But that's certainly enough to make problems all over the country -- Heidi.
You can already see the big red boxes here popping up across parts of the upper Midwest and also down across the Southeast.
We'll keep you up to date on where they're going this afternoon, too -- back to you.
COLLINS: All right, Chad, thanks so much.
TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com
