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“It was a bad Friday for me,” said Jas Singh, a Tyson truck driver from Indianapolis, on Friday morning after assessing storm damage to his vehicle.
Singh parked his semi-tractor to the left of Dollar General around 5:30 last night. It’s his first time in Storm Lake. By around 9 a.m. on April 18, Singh was fielding phone calls from Tyson and his insurance representative. He had no way to drive himself anywhere for shelter or food.
“I have no car,” Singh said. “I don’t know how to get lunch.”
Arnold Borrones, a truck driver from south Texas, parked near Singh Thursday night after eating dinner at Plaza Mexico. He fell asleep in his truck before 10 p.m. Thursday. Around 1:15 a.m. when an intense wind swept through Storm Lake, Borrones was sleeping.
“All I remember is waking up with my head under the steering wheel,” Borrones said. “I heard a loud ‘boom! boom!’ almost like a vacuum cleaner.”
Overnight, forceful gusts moved Borrones’s semi-tractor over 20 feet.
He spent the early morning hours clearing large chunks of metal and wood debris from around and underneath the vehicle. The semi has broken windows, broken siding, flat tires and a mound of wreckage underneath preventing Borrones from moving it.
A powerful storm swept through Storm Lake around 1:15 a.m. Friday. Buena Vista County Emergency Management recommended remaining home early Friday morning to prevent traffic congestion and allow easier cleanup.
The National Weather Service has declared the intense storm that swept Storm Lake and neighboring communities in the early morning hours Friday as straight-line winds.
Meteorologists have asserted the storm was not a tornado.
Todd Heitkamp, a meteorologist in charge at the NWS branch in Sioux Falls, S.D., stated late Friday afternoon that “the storms developed well behind the cold front, so the odds of any tornado developing with the storms would be very small.”
“Based on photos of the scene, strong straight-line winds appear to be the cause of all the damage,” according to a statement from Dana Larsen, city communications coordinator, April 18 around 2 p.m.
Residents awake around 1 a.m. when a tremendous wind hit would have heard a loud roar and the crackle of debris hitting house siding. The gust lasted less than a minute, followed by a quiet stillness.
The roof at Touch Above salon in the 400 block of Seneca Street flew off during the storm. Owner Danielle Brock and three helpers removed armfuls of damp insulation from the roof and around the building. Water leaked through a gaping hole in the roof, damaging some of the interior store. She was supposed to have the day off for Good Friday, she said.
After initially assessing damage to her store, Brock strongly believed a tornado whipped through town.
“There’s just no way,” Brock said of the straight-line winds.
Jeff Chapman, a meteorologist also based in Sioux Falls, explained that the path of damage the storm left behind proves Storm Lake experienced straight-line winds.
Chapman confirmed wind speeds through Storm Lake measured up to 80 miles per hour. A semi-truck driver told the Times Pilot Friday morning that gales pushed his vehicle 20 feet while he was inside of it.
Chapman said the NWS discerns straight-line from tornadic winds by primarily analyzing the path and extent of storm damage.
“For a straight-line wind pattern — which will typically be divergent — when the damage is all done, it’s basically done in one direction,” Chapman explained. Tornados, on the other hand, “will have a converging pattern of damage toward the center of (its) path, and it will show some differences in direction.”
Chapman claimed if the storm through Buena Vista County had been tornadic, meteorologists would have classified it as one of the lowest levels of severity.
“I don’t think it was a tornado,” speculated Jerry Kahl, of Jerry’s Tree Service around 2 p.m. Friday as he helped clear a fallen 40-foot-tall Colorado spruce from the roof of a house on Irving Street. “There would’ve been more houses destroyed.”
Chapman compared Friday’s storm to a derecho that swept across Iowa in December 2021. He said the derecho had a wind damage pattern much larger in scale even though Storm Lake experienced similar levels of destruction this year.
“It’s not an unheard of (weather) system that created this,” Chapman said of the stormfront that began forming last Thursday. “It’s a little bit on the climatologically rare scale, but it’s not something that hasn’t been in that general area before.”
Chapman noted a larger storm system started developing west of Iowa on Thursday.
“Behind that front, there was a little bit of what we call elevated instability that remained, even though the front had gone by,” he said. Chapman also noted that instability caused updrafts that produced large hail across parts of southern Iowa.
The front started moving eastward through Sioux Falls, S.D., around 2:30 p.m.
Thursday and initially reached Storm Lake around 8:30 p.m., according to Chapman. Storms formed behind that boundary and lagged to the west, “allowing that air mass to stay in an unstable environment,” he added.
But when the surface front travelled through Storm Lake, winds shifted to the north, the temperature dropped between 15 to 20 degrees and a downburst forced the wind to the lowest 3,000 feet of the atmosphere.
“In this case, it was a strong enough system in that thunderstorm that the wind basically punched down in that one corridor through Storm Lake,” Chapman said.
MidAmerican Energy worked all day Friday to reinstate power to over 6,400 homes in Storm Lake alone.
Storm-related outages were also reported in Early, Fonda, Nemaha, Newell, Sulphur Springs and Varina, according to a statement from MidAmerican Friday morning.
At around 10 a.m. Friday, MidAmerican reported 6,485 Storm Lake customers remained without power. By the end of the day, power was restored to nearly every affected area, according to Mayor Mike Porsch at a city council meeting Monday, April 21.
Kevin Taylor of MidAmerican said the Storm Lake plant was “a mess” after the storm due to tipped power lines and fallen wires.
Three transmission lines experienced “heavy damage.” Around two dozen transmission poles have broken and taken down an unspecified number of overhead lines, according to the statement. In other words, both the power transmission and distribution systems sustained damage. MidAmerican dispatched extra line and tree crews to all affected areas for restoration work.
“So far we’ve identified at least 10 broken poles in Storm Lake and there are downed overhead lines at several locations,” the MidAmerican statement reported.
Public safety crews around the city began cleanup efforts in the early morning hours. Dozens of trees uprooted. Roofs blew off. Insulation, tree branches and other miscellaneous debris flew several hundred feet all around city limits. The west wall of Merrill Manufacturing on North Lake Avenue caved in. Semi trucks tipped over. Fallen tree limbs littered Chautauqua Park and damaged the shelter house.
Mayor Porsch issued a neary 15-minute-long thank you to all Storm Lake city staff and a slate of other volunteers at a council meeting Monday.
“It’s times like these I am reminded of how proud I am to be the mayor of Storm Lake,” Porsch said after listing off dozens of individual and group volunteers who assisted in cleanup efforts. “I’d like to extend a heartfelt thanks to all the volunteers and people who made this go as smoothly as possible.”
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