3/15/2016 Storm Chase Reup: Glimpse of Trivoli/Hanna City, IL Tornado, Siren Ambiance + Lightning

On this chase of an early season tornado event in north-central Illinois, my chase partner and I essentially lucked into a glimpse of the EF2 tornado that occurred from just northwest of Trivoli to north of Hanna City right at twilight.

I've previously never uploaded any of the video from this chase prior to the tornado encounter, and I'd forgotten how electrified the storms were during that phase. At the start of the video we are passing through the city of Kewanee, IL, heading south out of town on US 34 and then bearing left at the junction with IL-78 to continue south, intending to intercept the "tail-end Charlie" at the southern end of one of the clusters of storm cells then ongoing in the area (a separate storm, further south still, would produce a tornado just west of Springfield around the same time as our tornado encounter).

This route eventually took us to IL-116 (Farmington Rd.), and we stopped for fuel and snacks at the Casey's gas station on the west edge of Hanna City. Our storm hadn't looked great on radar and we mistakenly let our guard down, thinking our tornado window had closed for this chase. While we were dinking around, it underwent a cell merger and abruptly intensified just west of us. Several things happened in rapid succession. Both our cell phones alerted simultaneously with a WEA for a tornado warning, the town's sirens blared to life, and the radar on our laptop updated to reveal an intense velocity couplet just to our northwest!

I put my camcorder in its slow-shutter "night vision" mode, and pointed it northwest to glimpse in the lightning flashes what sure looked like a large cone funnel hanging down to the tree line. As you can tell from the commentary, we were both in a bit of disbelief at what we were looking at, and not quite certain of it due to the darkness and trees. Although we had a pretty good idea based on the surrounding storm structure and the radar presentation in the direction we were looking.

In retrospect, I wish we'd stayed put to shoot it a little bit longer or even moved a little bit west to get around that tree line. However, we were both a little spooked by the chain of events, and bailed east down 116 to stay well ahead of the "feature," losing it in the darkness. We reached Peoria and cut east out of town on US 24 (a fortuitous decision, given that the storm would produce another tornado in Peoria just minutes later).

Catching I-39 north toward home at El Paso, we were treated to a spectacular display of anvil crawlers and CGs on the back side of the cells, which I recorded some of with the 720p video mode on my old DSLR.