Tornado survey teams from the National Weather Service will be scouting several locations in western and central Iowa today after a powerful line of storms rumbled across the state last night, dropping an undetermined number of twisters.
Meteorologist Devin Chehak, at the National Weather Service office in Valley, Nebraska, says a long line of storms churned out multiple, dangerous cells.
“One of them likely produced a brief tornado near Little Sioux, Iowa,” Chehak says. “We still need to send out a survey team to confirm everything, but we do believe there was at least one tornado.”
The same line of storms is suspected of spinning off more twisters in southwest Iowa’s Fremont County, where Clayton Long is the emergency management coordinator.
“It sounds like we had two tornadoes that touched down east of Riverton, and south of Farragut,” Long says. “These impacted agriculture lands. There were two debris clouds that were shown. We’re still trying to work through the pictures and videos coming in.”
Long says the tornado touchdowns in the county were all reported on agricultural lands and there are no reports of any serious damage or injuries. Some areas of Iowa had large hail, high winds and heavy rain.
Meteorologist Rod Donavon, at the National Weather Service office in Johnston, says more tornadoes struck as the storms moved into central Iowa.
“We did have quite a few reports of hail across western Iowa. We had a few tornadoes across southwest Iowa into central Iowa, a couple just south of Ames and one just east of the Des Moines area as well,” Donavon says, “and we had some scattered reports of damage with that.”
The forecast calls for the chance for more scattered storms over Iowa on Sunday and into Monday.
(By Mike Peterson, KMA, Shenandoah and Pat Powers, KQWC, Webster City)