I never thought I’d say “career intercept” and Iowa in the same sentence, but alas, here it goes… I had a… CAREER INTERCEPT… in…. IOWA…

Waking up in Iowa City to the double-barrel high risk, we opted to play the Iowa target.  For us, this was a no-brainer call.  The southern play was obviously quite a haul from where we were, so it didn’t really make sense for us to do that.  We also had plenty of coverage down that way, so everything just said, ‘Play Iowa’.  The state certainly had been doing me well the last couple years, so I didn’t carry my usual pessimistic outlook heading in to today.

The plan was to play southeast of Des Moines with our target city being Ottumwa.  All the high resolution models were very optimistic on that area.  We didn’t see any reason to deviate from that.  We headed down to Ottumwa, got lunch and fuel, and pretty much waited around in the city til things started popping.

Several storms fired to our west/southwest.  We debated on whether or not to jump on those, but the forward speeds of these storms, 50-60mph, had us conversing about whether to hang on for the storms that were forming in northern Missouri.  Our logic was we’d quickly end up chasing from behind the storms that were currently to our west as opposed to being able to stay ahead of the storms developing down south.  We also wanted to allow time for things to strengthen, and we figured jumping too early would possible put us behind the action once it started to go.

A small factor in the decision was my first live hit of the day.  I wanted to be on-camera and stationary for it as opposed to mobile.  So with all that in hand, we decided we’d wait for the cells coming out of Missouri, and my first live hit detailed that plan, mentioning we had about 60-90 minutes before our target storm would get up this way.

After finishing out live hit, we decided to get on the north side of the city.  Usually I’d make a hail play there in town as the storm was heading straight for Ottumwa (and us).  But the storm speeds were too fast to think we could do anything in town and get back out in time to catch back up with the storm, so it was the cliche hurry-up-and-wait.

We did another scheduled live hit, plus an extra hit as the supercell, which radar indicated was getting some strong rotation going, was now about to enter the city.  Ed and I began to discuss our intercept, and decide when to pull the trigger and go.  This was our storm.

Given the path of the storm, we decided to skip east one road, taking the Us-63 loop down to Agency, then shooting north on Agency-Hedrick Road.  We figured we’d end up right along side the storm a couple miles north of the junction.  We weren’t wrong.  At 3:37pm northeast of Ottumwa, we witnessed the birth of a monster.

With an absolutely pristine view, we moved up the road about a mile or so just to keep pace.  I was attempting to go live on our network with the live tornado, but audio issues prevented a report.  Still, they tapped into the live stream and we got the tornado live on air!

We weren’t able to stop very long, just a quick moment to get a few stationary grabs of this rapidly strengthening tornado.  I stayed in the car shooting out the window so I could get us moving as quickly as needed.  Ed got out for a moment to grab some shots in front of the car.

We quickly got moving as this tornado was hauling 50+MPH to the northeast.  We had a perfect intercept, one we’ve done a million times before, particularly in our TWISTEX days.  We’d basically roll up the road and wait for it to cross to our north.  This tornado strengthened as fast as any tornado I have ever seen, going from that dust whirl to the monster crossing the road in front of us in only a couple minutes.

As this tornado continued hauling northeast, it grew into a massive wedge, quickly putting distance between us and it.

We stopped briefly when we encountered a couple vehicles in the road. One was storm chaser Tanner Charles, who was in front of us and had a VERY front row seat.  He stopped to help the driver of a pickup truck who looked to have been hit by the south side of the tornado.

We briefly pulled up along side, but got a quick thumbs-up from Tanner, so we continued up the road as the tornado was now starting to get too far ahead of us.

We made it up to IA-149 on the east side of Hedrick and cut east, hoping we could stair-step our way north and east to catch back up.  Ed noted a possible satellite tornado as we went along, but as I was driving and focused on the road ahead, I never saw this. Shortly after making the east turn, we crossed the damage path again and saw a farm property that took a severe hit.  We quickly determined no one was on the property and we proceeded to do another live cut-in from this spot.

 

With this storm and associated tornadoes out of reach, we decided to get easy to go after storms on the Illinois side of the line.  Those offered our best chance to catch as we were now hopefully behind the supercell we had been pursuing.

By this point, our target cells had become a line, and we came in on the south side of the line, barely getting into some precip near Woodhull as we came in on IL-17.  Further north into that line, several semi trucks got blown off I-74 due to the strong winds.  We passed several scenes, all with crews already there.

With sunset approaching, we worked our way up to Davenport.  Hearing reports of damage from a tornado in Iowa City, we decided to basically go full-circle, staying in the same place we stayed the night before so we could do coverage the following morning of that tornado.  When we got into town, we encountered the damage path of the tornado that went through the area.

We got up the following morning to a reminder that was indeed April 1… a harsh north wind and cold temps made for a winter-feeling morning as we covered the damage in the Iowa City area.  Several live reports talking about the event, including the tornado we chased plus the reports of destruction left behind in the wake of what would be the biggest outbreak of 2023.

NWS Damage surveys indicate this tornado was an EF-2 with max winds estimated at 125MPH.  The tornado we chased, initially thought to be a long-track EF-4, turned out to be the first of two tornadoes spawned from our cell.  Our tornado was rated EF-3, the second one that came down on the backend was rated EF-4.