Damaging tornadoes sweep through Iowa

AccuWeather

Storm chaser Tony Laubach reported live from Iowa on the evening of May 21 after a day full of tornadoes in the state.

Transcript

00:00AccuWeather meteorologist and storm chaser Tony Laubach has been following this days-long severe weather threat.

00:05He's joining us live in Eddyville, Iowa. I hear the wind, we can see it. Tony, what are you up against there?

00:13Well, I'm up against a little bit of a breeze here as some non-severe storms roll their way over.

00:17You kind of see the line of that extending off to the north and east.

00:21This actually, see the lowering right there over the trees, actually had a little rotation in it not too long ago.

00:26Nothing I would call tornadic by any stretch, but we are now getting back into the rain here.

00:31It's going to start coming down on me, so I'm going to just bump this over here just a little bit,

00:35because I didn't bring rain gear on my camera.

00:38But, we have been talking about storms and tornadoes pretty much all day today.

00:42We're going to take you back to Stanton. This was probably the top intercept for us today.

00:46We intercepted three, possibly four tornadoes.

00:49This one just to the east of Red Oak. We put all these tornadoes live on the AccuWeather network.

00:56We were verifying these on the ground as they were happening.

00:59This one, the second tornado we saw, again to the east of Red Oak.

01:02We saw a tornado in the Red Oak area on the west side of town.

01:06Then we saw this tornado coming up, and it was moments later we saw a third coming out of these.

01:11These storms were rotating and dropping tornadoes exceptionally quickly.

01:15You notice, though, you're looking at this video, it really wasn't fully condensed.

01:19The only fully condensed tornado we saw was the Red Oak tornado.

01:22Some of these are a little deceptive looking for folks that might have been in the way of these things.

01:26They turned out to be quite strong in some cases here.

01:29We know Greenfield, Iowa taking a big hit right now.

01:32A lot of the roads up in that neck of the woods are closed right now.

01:35They're not letting anybody in or out of that particular area right now.

01:38We are dealing with some of those very destructive tornadoes.

01:41That was going to be something we were concerned with today.

01:43We've seen that pretty much across the state of Iowa, up and down the whole line of storms.

01:48These storms formed early.

01:50We were talking as early as 11 at noon.

01:53Then we started to see the severe thunderstorm mornings popping up near the Omaha area.

01:57We tracked south to get into the warm sector, the warmer area.

02:01That is where we tracked all the storms along U.S. Highway 34,

02:05pretty much across the state of Iowa from west to east.

02:09We're about 14 miles northwest of Ottumwa, Iowa right now.

02:17We are considering heading down south into Missouri where we've had some newly warned storms down that way.

02:23That's an area that we're going to be watching here as we're going to continue to work our way to the south as we go through the evening.

02:30Certainly, the severe weather threat not done by any stretch, particularly as you get further east and further north.

02:35You mentioned that new tornado watch.

02:37That is going to be keeping this threat going probably well into the evening.

02:41All right, Tony.

02:43We appreciate that report and all that you're doing here.

02:46What you're offering there from the ground is very important in communicating to our viewers the danger and what can happen there.

02:54Some of that footage that you captured very early on there, roof partly damaged from a home and other things like that.

02:59They speak pretty loudly.

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