Tony chases down massive tornado in Texas

AccuWeather

Tony Laubach joined the AccuWeather Network to recount the massive tornado he chased down in Morton, Texas, on June 5. The tornado lifted up massive piles of dust, which added to the ominous sight.

Transcript

00:00Tony, you had an incredible chase yesterday. We've been watching the images all morning.

00:04Tell us how you've witnessed, I think, a multitude of tornadoes from a cell last night.

00:10How did you intercept that? How did you keep up with it? We want to hear all about it.

00:17Well, it was certainly a task. As we mentioned, storm chaser, you could probably put an S on that

00:23to go all day because there were hundreds, if not thousands, of storm chasers tracking this one

00:30particular storm. We knew that was going to be one of the issues in this primary target. There were two

00:35targets yesterday, one that crossed southwest Kansas and southeast Colorado, and I was kind of

00:40mixed between the two, but opted to go ahead and take my chances and joined thousands of my best

00:46friends and tracked this, pretty much the headliner of this storm that produced maybe a dozen plus

00:53tornadoes from New Mexico into Texas. The video of this, just absolutely incredible. You can only

00:58imagine what it was like being there in the moment, and this is a wide-angle shot, folks. We were not,

01:04we were a little closer than this camera might show, but we were in a safe position. Actually,

01:09southwest of this particular tornado, this storm was so strong, it was pulling in dust from miles upon

01:17miles away. It was basically enshrouding the entire storm in dust from a couple of miles away,

01:23so views like this were only obtainable when you were kind of inside that ring of dust within a couple

01:28of miles of this monster tornado. I'm super excited, the meteorologist in me, with all the Doppler radars,

01:35the mobile Doppler radar units that were out there, some of the images that have already been shared of

01:40some of these radar signatures. This is going to be a very, very researched tornado for sure, with,

01:45again, I would say a dozen plus trucks and research crews all on this particular tornado. So a lot of

01:51things probably to come from this. This will probably be an event that not only is going to live on here

01:55from a local's perspective, but certainly in a scientific perspective. But as you mentioned,

02:00there were multiple tornadoes on this cell. As I was making the approach here, even late arriving as

02:05the storm was to produce multiple tornadoes in New Mexico, I actually saw two or three small brief

02:10tornadoes prior to this big one. And then even while watching the big one, I saw a satellite tornado

02:16with that. So I was sitting at about five or six tornadoes by that point. And then the second round

02:21came as we were approaching the Lubbock area. This is where the night got kind of scary. We were making

02:25reports last night on the AccuWeather Network, if you were watching with us, with deep concern for the

02:29city of Lubbock because this storm, while moving slowly, was pretty much making a beeline right for the city

02:34of Lubbock and, of course, was continuing to produce tornado after tornado. Just before I got to town, I'd say within about

02:4010 miles near Rees Center, produced another very large tornado. And again, that one also having a satellite

02:46that I witnessed. But fortunately, the higher powers that be decided we had had enough with the tornadoes. So before

02:53moving into Lubbock, the tornado activity ceased on this storm and actually kind of took a dive to the southeast

02:59as it was approaching me. And I had to drive as far south as I could and actually decided because at this point, dark was

03:06falling. The storm was really, really dangerous with the winds. We had wind gusts over 100 miles per

03:11hour recorded on mesonet sites, hail up to softball size recording, of course, torrential downpours.

03:16None of us want anything to do with that. So I actually came in around the back side of the storm,

03:21drove all the way south to get around it and then came back into Lubbock and immense amounts of street

03:26flooding. Some wind damage reported, but the city spared the worst of that. Certainly that would have been

03:31an absolute devastating experience there for the city had those tornadoes continued as it was moving

03:38into the metro. So that was a huge relief, not only for us as chasers that were tracking that storm,

03:44but certainly for the folks that were living in Lubbock. The bad news, unfortunately, today we're

03:49kind of reloading, doing the same thing again. Similar type setup down this way. Overnight storms last

03:55night, including here in Plainview. I was up till three o'clock as severe storms rolled through here,

03:59bringing near 70 mile per hour winds, actually caused a couple of leaks in the ceiling of the hotel.

04:04But we certainly had a long night last night, but a similar situation. And we'll be tracking those

04:10storms again this afternoon, pretty much in the same areas, under the same setup, but that outflow

04:14boundary from last night's storms kind of sitting in the area with the potential to produce again

04:19numerous tornadoes down here across the south, the Texas Panhandle and the Western Plains. And it'll be

04:24something we'll be tracking again. And hopefully we do not see a repeat of what we saw yesterday. Certainly

04:29in the populated areas, it's the good news out here in the Western High Plains. There's not a lot

04:33out here outside of the towns, but we will be certainly tracking and fearful again that we could

04:39be doing the same thing again today that we saw yesterday. Tony, I have a question for you. You've

04:44been doing this quite a few years now. How rare are days like yesterday where you see multiple tornadoes,

04:50you capture it well-defined on video. How rare are those days in your career?

04:54I wouldn't say they're rare, but they're certainly uncommon. I would estimate maybe one or two times

05:02a year you get a situation where you have a cyclic supercell, one particular storm you track that

05:07produces just a family of tornadoes like this. This would probably be the second time this year,

05:12the other one going back to May 18th, where we saw about half a dozen tornadoes between Scott

05:17City and Grinnell. So twice already this year, but certainly an uncommon thing.

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