Footage of multiple tornadoes from a localized tornado outbreak in southwestern Iowa on Tuesday, May 21, 2024. Tornadoes are captured at Red Oak, Villisca and Corning, IA. Copyright Dan Robinson
Reminds me of the Katie/Wynnewood tornado where a mature evergreen tree can be clearly seen rotating around the tornado several times, complete with it's root ball, before it gets tossed out of the circulation landing hundreds of feet away. And the losing shots are rather majestic-looking. Great work as always Dan- thanks for posting!
Great shots, Dan! After yesterday I've chased three times in Iowa this year and been on tornado-warned storms each time, but missed seeing the tornadoes (other than quick maybe-glimpses of the first Afton EF2 and Winterset/East Peru EF-U on April 26). Hearing the sirens in your Red Oak shots made me think of something interesting. Each time I passed through a town or city within an active tornado warning polygon on April 16 (Cedar Rapids, Burlington) the sirens were sounding. However, on April 26 I passed through Bedford (wall cloud visible to the west), Afton (tornado visible in the distance to the north) and Lorimor (tornado had just roped out to the west) during active polygons and heard no sirens. Then yesterday I was in Chariton when the warning was issued ahead of the cell coming up from Lineville, whose polygon contained the town, and I drove right by a siren in a park and it was not sounding. The policy of when to sound must vary county to county or even community to community.
Older sirens can't be run continuously, so they usually run for 3- 5 minutes then are switched off to cool down for an equal length if time so it's possible to drive through a small town and hear nothing even though the sirens have been activated. Sirens are not controlled by the NWS but local entities instead. It's usually Emergency Management, the local Fire department, or Police, but it varies. More than a few small communities weren't warned by sirens through the years because the responsible person wasn't there to do it or the switch was locked and whoever had the key wasn't there. Other times grid power went down which the older style sirens need to function. Many places have now switched from sirens to cellphone alert messages due to the higher costs to maintain sirens and have not yet taken the old sirens down. Many of the new electronic sirens have battery back-up but in general sirens are going away except for some college campuses and large factories or field operations where people may not have other means of warning available to them. Best to not depend solely on sirens.
