Chase 1 Ends...good and bad

Well, the good news is that no one is hurt and was saw a tornado. The bad news is we lost our roof rack after driving into a downed power line.

We had been driving back to stay with the storm, nothing major just trying to get back to where the supercell was. We turned a curve and we say the lines hanging across the road a few feet above the ground. Ryan tried to stop and avoid the wires but it was not possible. The wires hit
across our windshield and moved up across the windows. No problems until it hit and caught the rack. We carried the wires for a while until it knocked everything off the roof. We were afraid there might have been live wires and were afraid at first to get out of the van. Van 2 pulled up and shown the lights, saw that we had pulled away from the wires and had lost the rack.

Laura determined that the wires were not live any more (along with a few cops who came on scene) and they moved the wires off the rack. They had come unraveled and it was pretty cool.
We lost the wires from all the antennas and the sleeve on the fiberglass roof had come undone. Luckily for us, Nichole and Amy had been chasing nearby and came to our aid. We were able to salvage most of the stuff into the back of Nichole's truck. We left behind some of the black conduit figuring it was easy enough to replace them. We left the scene and found a different hotel room in Jonesboro. Lots of little things to do but that is the basic story. All are well and the van has minimal damage. Our rack, well...that will require some serious work.

Oh...and we saw a nighttime tornado. That was cool. Tough day. More later.

Paul