Iowa Highway Ends (etc.)

I know it doesn’t look great, but the NWS used two mapping services and I had to play with sizing. The slightly darker black line running north-south and then along the bottom left of the map is US 63. The blue bounds mark each tornado’s path with EF0-scale winds. The light green is for EF1 damage. The EF2 damage area in the southwest corner of Traer cannot be seen on this scale, only by the yellow triangle. The July 6 tornado was much longer, but left much less damage.

Bottom line, two tornadoes spawned within miles of each other a week apart, and Traer has a big item for the 2023 sesquicentennial book.

Report for June 30 (HTML with animated GIFs and Google Map)

Report for July 6 Grundy and Tama counties (PDF)

Full notification due after my earlier post. Tama County received both the disaster emergency and Iowa Individual Assistance Program qualification. Benton County only received the former.

This is very interesting. Despite an EF2 tornado chewing up part of Traer with tree damage throughout town, and severe flooding on the Iowa River bad enough to close US 63 and swamp Chelsea (again), the list on the Iowa Homeland Security website does not include Tama County among the 19 counties designated for state resources and/or individual assistance since June 30.

The list does include Adair and Guthrie, which got hit with large hail earlier in the day on June 30, and Black Hawk and Marshall, which had flooding on the Cedar and Iowa rivers. In fact, every county with a major segment of the Iowa River south of Iowa Falls except for Tama and Washington has received a declaration.

Admittedly, this post may carry a little whiff of “it’s not a disaster unless it happens to you,” but I’d be curious about the rationale for not granting Tama County access to assistance.

UPDATE: Disaster proclamation issued July 10.

The National Weather Service makes quick work of storm damage surveys. It has a combined report for the July 6 Reinbeck and Traer tornadoes*, both rated EF1. I was going to make a composite map with the June 30 track, but this one is embedded in a PDF with a different mapping service so it will take some work.

The up-close storm chaser’s footage was wrapped into larger weather pieces yesterday on both Today and Good Morning America.

The Waterloo Courier used last week’s tornado as the main basis for an Iowans-are-awesome editorial.

*With one being June 30 and the other being July 6, we at least have that to differentiate the Traer tornadoes in the future, and worry less about “no, not that one, the other one”.

July 6, 2014: A small tornado in Tama County was visible from the Morrison farm. The debris in the foreground is from a different tornado that hit Monday. Photo by Judy Morrison.

The Traer area just had tornadoes roll through again. This is the worst outbreak in my lifetime, and most likely the worst in Tama County history.

The northern two townships of Tama County — the northernmost tier plus Perry and Clark specifically — have had three days in the past eight where tornado warnings were issued. (There was also a severe thunderstorm warning on June 27.)

The most recent tornado or tornadoes (may or may not have been the same one that hit near Reinbeck) was/were captured on video at the Buckingham corner, the southwest corner of Traer, and way way WAY too close for rational thought. It nearly took out the Zobel farmstead but only hit the barn, according to this tweet from Samantha Zobel. KWWL has a gallery that includes submitted pictures taken from Traer.

The expanded NWS report for the June 30 tornado is available now. The tornado was hard to see on radar because it was right about that time that the front congealed into a derecho that went east all the way to Lake Michigan. The Chicago NWS reports that two separate derechos formed that day. The first is tracked back to central Iowa at 2 PM; the Traer tornado warning was issued at 2:03.

From tornadoes to blizzards, it’s easy to see why Midwesterners have a healthy respect/fear of nature.