Spring-like storm will long be remembered

During the afternoon and evening of last Wednesday a highly unusual storm focused on our area. Like the blizzard of 1888, it was one that will long be remembered and talked about. It came incredibly just five years after a similarly-unusual but less-impactful event occurred on Christmas Day 2016.

In briefings held in advance of the storm National Weather Service employees at the Hastings office said in all their years they had never seen a storm setting up like this one was. It an unusually-intense and fast-moving low pressure system which swept through the region, setting off:

1) a rapidly-moving squall line of severe thunderstorms producing not only widespread, damaging straight-line winds, but also several, embedded tornadoes (all rated EF0-EF1).

2) Behind the severe thunderstorms, there was a several-hours long period of intense, damaging westerly winds featuring widespread measured gusts of 60-80 MPH (and isolated, unofficial gusts to nearly 100 MPH!) At the Superior airport the wind gusts 80.6 miles per hour.

3) Because of the intense winds and dry air in the wake of the earlier thunderstorms, unusually-large wildfires (especially by our area's standards) broke out in north central and central Kansas, with the overall conglomerate of fires dubbed the "Four County Fire" by the Kansas Forest Service. These fires scorched roughly 400,000 acres, burned several homes many outbuildings and killed hundreds of livestock. Had that fire occurred in Jewell County, it would have covered about 54 percent of the county. The next day cowboys with rifles were called in to put down the burnt and suffering animals.

While the fire didn't reach this newspaper's prime circulation area many of our subscribers have friends or relatives who live in the fire zone.

We haven't confirmed it but it appears the family that provided the horse drawn carriage rides for the Burr Oak Christmas event that was featured in last week's paper was among those caught by the fires. They apparently lost a cabin and one of the horses they used for the Burr Oak event.

As the storm rolled in from the west, the dark dirt cloud reminded longtime residents of the stories their parents told of the 1930s dust storms.

We don't know how much rain was received for it flew past vertically. Officially the weather service measured .07 but a CoCoRaHS gauge at the north edge of Superior measured 0.16 and one in Superior caught 0.03. Likely gauges caught only a small part of the rain.

The following is taken from the Kansas Reflector. The Reflector is part of the States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.

There's almost nothing left of Deb Maupin's home near Paradise in north-central Kansas - a bench on the front porch with nothing behind it but the concrete of the basement, now full of ash, scorched appliances where the kitchen was.

Hers is one of more than a dozen families who lost their homes to extraordinary wildfires that ripped through communities northeast of Hays.

And while she and her husband, Tom, plan to rebuild on the land - one of several properties where the family runs cattle - memories and pictures can't be replaced. She said getting the call from her son Wednesday night that the house was gone as she and Tom stayed with friends in Russell was "devastating."

"You think of all the things that you've had that are gone," Maupin said, holding back tears as she listed the things she wished she could have back: her grandmother's framed marriage certificate, her daughter and daughter-in-law's wedding dresses, family albums and jewelry given to her for anniversaries.

Maupin said she was grateful nobody was home when the blaze swept through. When she pulled up to the scorched house on Thursday, and already knew it was gone, she was thinking about how Tom felt.

"I don't know whether you just have an empty feeling kind of because it's all gone and it's sad knowing that nothing's there anymore," Maupin said. "And we had so many family gatherings over the holidays."

"Usually it takes 30 minutes to an hour to burn a house down. It was just like within a minute. The fire was past the house and the house was gone."

The first thing she did was check on the animals near the house. The four calves and mule were unscathed, despite scorched earth all around them. Three of her six cats are accounted for, and a firefighter found the family's dog in Paradise unharmed but covered in dirt and soot to the point she was nearly unrecognizable.

Unseasonably warm temperatures, extraordinary winds and weeks without rain left north-central Kansas at high risk for fires. Several blazes ignited Wednesday, and when an extraordinary storm pushed wind speeds as high as 100 mph, they became nearly impossible to contain. Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly dispatched the Kansas National Guard with Black Hawk helicopters to help control the blaze.

"It looked like a massive, massive ball of rolling fire and smoke," said

Keith Haberer, emergency manager for Russell and Ellsworth counties, has worked as a firefighter and emergency manager for more than 20 years. He described the blaze as "incredible." He said he had never seen fire move that fast.

The smoke "was so bad ahead of the fire that you could not see the flames right away until you got up closer, and then they went past you so fast," he said.

"It looked like a massive, massive ball of rolling fire and smoke.".

While prairie fires usually form a line and move in the same direction, U.S. Sen. Jerry Moran said at a news conference in Hays, the Four Counties Fire was made up of several separate blazes sparked by falling power lines because of the high winds.

The exact toll of the damage isn't yet clear. Counties will do separate damage assessments, including homes, businesses and agricultural land. At least a dozen homes were lost in the areas of Russell and Osborne counties Nine Ellis County homes were lost completely. Trego County officials said four homes were destroyed in their county.

The fires killed a man in Ellis County, according to the Associated Press.

Families like Maupin's also saw acres upon acres of pasture or cropland burn. She said they lost 100 cattle. It will be years before the family is made whole. Rebuilding the herd, she said, will take time to ensure quality and avoid bringing diseases into the herd. The big problem, though, is that the fire burned off her winter pasture.

"Then the spring, you know, we'll get rain hopefully," she said, "and I'll just pray for some snow right now to help get some moisture back into the ground."

Somehow, though, four calves in a pen near Maupin's home survived. The family has herds on several plots of land in the area that made it through. They have a herd that grazes on land owned by a friend, who herded the cattle into a soybean field where they were safe from the fire.

As the fires were brought under control, land owners and volunteers were starting to rebuild the miles upon miles of fence that was destroyed by the fire and feed for the surviving animals was being trucked in.

Eric Metzger, a National Weather Service meteorologist, said the largest fire on satellite imagery was in Russell County, where blazes had merged in a massive one that appeared to be 40 miles long. On satellite images, the light of the flames rivaled the lights of nearby towns including Hays, Pratt and Russell.

The following is condensed from a story written by Rachel Gabel for The Fence Post, an online ag news service.

David and Stephanie (Stielow) Dickerson run cattle on Bar S Ranch at Paradise, Kan. Stephanie told J Bradley Hook on the Genuine JBH Podcast they received a call around 3 p.m. last Wednesday from the sheriff's office that there was a fire reported near Fairport, a small community located about 6 miles west of their ranch. The flames were headed north toward the home of Dickersons' friends and neighbors, Craig and Jolene Lawson. The Lawsons reached out to the Dickersons, asking them to bring trailers to help evacuate their roping horses. The Dickersons, along with their son Jace and Jace's college roommate, Austin Clock, headed to help with two rigs.

When they arrived, still fighting 65 mph sustained winds and gusts up to 107 mph, Lawson told them they had turned the horses loose because they were surrounded by the fire. The Dickersons turned back to the southeast, toward their ranch, and made it about two miles before wind gusts tipped over the pickup and trailer David and Jace were driving. David and Jace crawl out of the wrecked pickup.

"By the time they came back to the truck, the bumper-pull stock trailer I was pulling ripped off the truck and rolled into the ditch," she said. "All jumped in and David told me to 'get out of here.'"

At that point, Stephanie said they pulled into the driveway leading to the Pelton Ranch because the flames were shooting across the road.

Without any other options and with visibility that often even hid from view the front grill guard on the pickup she was driving, they tore through a ditch. The flames that surrounded them melted their side mirrors and headlights and burned the paint on the pickup.

They made it back through the flames to where the pickup and trailer lay in the ditch. Jason and Tyler Lund, who are volunteer firefighters and ranchers themselves, were searching the truck. Dickerson stopped to report they were not in the wrecked rig.

They followed Lund back to the Lawsons' home where Craig Lawson was still trying to move horses. He asked Dickerson to go to the house and bring Jolene out so they could all evacuate. With Jolene in the pickup and Craig and the couple's son behind them, they returned to the county road. Fire trucks were coming down the road and instructed them to follow.

The rigs and a single tanker truck led the way a couple of miles and off the road where they bounced out into the middle of a green wheat field.

Firefighters- all volunteers- doused the group of about 15 for about an hour while they waited for the flames to pass over them, praying all the while.

Once the group was able, they all returned to the Lawsons'. The family lost their barn and a number of horses. Several horses sustained injuries from fire and a barn door that blew off the structure. Their home was saved by the pond that redirected the fire line.

David and Stephanie left the boys at the Lawsons' to help, and returned to their home. Unable to drive the normal route, they drove west and south about 25 miles out of their way, passing downed power lines and multiple active structure fires. Their ranch, she said, sits in the Saline River Valley and they came in from the south, the high side, so they could better see what they were driving into.

The road was blocked by downed trees that were still burning. From a pasture east of their house she could see their home burning. Her three Corgis were inside. Their haystacks were burning, though their sale barn, where they host their annual bull sale, was still standing and the feedlot pens, working facilities, and calving barn were all intact. The family homestead where her grandfather was born in 1919, built at the turn of the century, was completely engulfed.

Dark now, and still windy with extremely limited visibility, the couple drove back toward their home. Earlier in the day, they had been working show cattle in preparation for the show in Oklahoma City in January. The show barn was still burning, though she said there were no cattle tied inside.

"In the time it took for us to drive to our feedlot and back, all that was left of my house was three concrete steps and the walls of the basement," she said.

Stephanie said she looked out at the burned shells of vehicles in the yard and told David she thought she had left her purse in her pickup.

She pried open the pickup door and said her purse and wallet were sitting there, untouched. She begged to go check on the show cattle but said David dragged her back into the pickup.

Fires weren't the only destructive force at work in recent days. The area had a taste of everything when it comes to weather, but none more so than the tornadoes on last Wednesday. National Weather Service storm surveys confirmed at least nine tornadoes in south central Nebraska on that date. Of the nine tornadoes, five were rated EF1 and four rated EF0 on the Enhanced Fujita (EF) scale.

Most of the damage was confined to rural areas. However, there were several outbuildings destroyed, power poles snapped, dozens of center irrigation pivots damaged and some minor house damage.

December tornadoes are rare, but have occurred in Nebraska. Prior to last Wednesday, a total of five December tornadoes had been confirmed in Nebraska since 1950. On Dec. 13,1975, two tornadoes rated F2 occurred, one in Thayer County and one in Pawnee County. In 2016, Christmas Day tornadoes were confirmed in Phelps County (rated EF1), Kearney County (rated EF0) and in Buffalo County (rated EF0).

Additional damage was incurred due to both straight-line thunderstorm winds and strong winds behind the storm system into the early evening hours.

Straight-line winds with the thunderstorms ranged from 55 to 85 mph, including an 85 mph wind gust measured at the Central Nebraska Regional Airport in Grand Island. Once the storms passed, high winds during the late afternoon and early evening gusted up to 76 mph at Davenport and 73 mph at both the Hastings and Ord airports.

The storm downed a few trees in Superior but the most significant damage appears to have been in Candy Cane Lane. Pam Frank, one of the Candy Cane Lane officers, said the damage was not as bad as first feared the popular attraction was closed only one day.

With the help of volunteers who assisted the attraction's regular crew everything that blew down was put back and running on Thursday. The Ferris wheel blew over and received the most serious damage, It was bent enough that it no longer turns but the crew was able to repair the lights.

Frank said Candy Cane Lane has experienced everything from electrical shorts caused by ice and snow to the recent wind storm. Considering the strength of the wind and what could have happened, Frank said she considers the damage to have been pretty mild.

Plans are to have Candy Cane Lane open from 6 to 9 p.m. each evening through New Year's Eve.

The Superior Volunteer Fire Department answered three fire calls during the storm. Two involved grass fires along the truck route and the third was for a burning power pole, also in the east part of town.

The South Central Public Power District had 22 poles damaged so severely they need to be replaced. Four, perhaps five were in Clay County and the rest in Nuckolls County. The district serves customers in Nuckolls, Clay, Adams and Webster counties.

Most of the poles lost were individual poles. The most in any consecutive line was three.

The Nebraska Public Power District line west of Pauline fell on top of the South Central line,

In all, service to about 200 South Central meters was interrupted by the storm. Service was restored to all of the customers by 10:30 Wednesday night, though there was about a three hour outage for some customers on Saturday while the NPPD lines were repaired.