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Since tornadoes hit Kearney on May 29th, a number of other violent thunderstorms have blasted through Central Nebraska, sending us to our basement at midnight on one occasion, and leaving us in the dark on another. Those storms arrived with hail, whipped rain, and more damaging winds. Yesterday, our power was out for a few hours as even more limbs succumbed in yet another onslaught and pulled some power lines down as they fell.

Just a few mile south of town, baseball-sized hail battered a trailer court, while quarter sized hail only dimpled car bodies at another trailer court east of town.

I did find some astounding photos of that first toranadic supercell (scroll down), or the cloud formation that beat and blended trees and power-lines throughout Kearney. I still haven’t located any photos of individual twisters touching down. The sky is mostly blue today; hope that lasts for a while.

I have been trying to rebuild a blog that crumbled due to a combination of server software upgrades, but every time I get into that project, power outages have killed my connection. Maybe I can complete that task this evening.

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A series of six or more F1 and F2, (lightweight) tornadoes blustered through Kearney on Thursday evening, May 29, 2008, doing considerable damage to the power infrastructure, and producing a few amazing sights, but leaving most of the city intact and no reported injuries. The local press seem to have missed the fact that this recent tornado event was a centennial reenactment of Kearney’s last significant encounter with the dreaded storms. On June 4th, 1908, the earlier storm system also sent several twisters raging through the town. One hundred years ago, those twisters destroyed several homes and killed a half-dozen people. The quirky behavior of the fearsome “cyclones” in 1908 were even featured in the August 1, 1908 issue of Scientific American Magazine. The 1908 aftermath was recorded by photo-documentarian, Solomon Butcher, and other local photographers.

I haven’t seen any good snapshots of funnel clouds from 2008, but several people reported seeing twisters before running for cover. The photos below are from a Scientific American article (8-1-1908). They were taken by Edward Bricker, but it is no surprise to to see that George Frank, the genius promoter of Kearney, is mentioned in this article. The photo captions say “One of the day’s seven tornadoes” and “The tornado picked up a castor from a table, unscrewed the top, took off the turntable, and drove the central rod into a tree.”

I didn’t take photos of the storm, or the more spectacular aftermath scenes, but lots of other people documented the the Gehry like distortion of a metal building at the fairgrounds, the stacked automobiles, the tipped train cars, and the exposed appartment on 39th street. I did take a series of photos of tree damage and the clean-up crew that quickly cleared the streets on Saturday. See a slideshow, or click a photo at right.

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