This was "The setup" of 2012. Very large 'High Risk' was in place over the core of Tornado Alley this day. All the ingredients that are needed were there, the key was just being in the right place when it happened.
I left Amarillo around 8am with Brady Kendrick toward a target of Greensburg, KS to start the day. On the way there, massive towers were popping by 11 amalong the OK/KS border.
We ended up being one of the first people on the first tornado warning of the day out near Greensburg. My video stream was picked up by KAKE, which lead to me having the top stream for the day, even though I ended missing most of the daylight tornadoes.
We were on atleast 4-6 different storms this day and saw tornadoes on 3 of them. We kept dropping south to the next storm, and the one we left would drop a big tornado. Very frustrating chase during the daylight hours with lots of traffic.
Toward dusk we had made our way down to Anthony, KS, near the stateline with OK. A prolific tornado producer was about to cross over into KS, with an ongoing tornado near Manchester, OK.
There was no way we were going to core this storm in my Saturn Ion, so we skirted around to the east of the rain south of Bluff City, KS. We stopped right on the stateline, to which we were greeted by the massive wedge immeadiately.
We quickly made our way back north. We hit a bump soon after this that triggered the (unknown at the time) infamous GM igintion issue. My car straight up turned off while going 40. Completely dark.
Luckily I was able to push in the clutch and restart while rolling. Having a large wedge at night just to your west is not when you want car trouble.
The storm was a pain to stay up with as we worked our way to Wichita, but were were able to keep our eyes on multiple tornadoes with the aid of lightning. We lost visual of the tornado as we got close to Wichita.
As we were approaching some heavy rain on the south side of Wichita, we noticed a powerflash inside of that rain and decided it was a good place to call the chase. We got some food and began our trek back toward Amarillo.
We stopped to sleep about an hour from Woodward, about the time a tornado tore into the west side of town. The next morning we traced the damage path from Woodward all the back to a mile outside of Arnett.
We talked to some of the ranchers that were hit along the way. Even found a boat sitting out in the middle of a field. It was probably thrown at least half a mile, given where it came to rest. We finally made it back to Amarillo around early afternoon.
