by Michael Tillotson
Saturday, June 27, 2009, 8:11pm
Yesterday morning my brother saw that there was a good setup for some strong storms in northern Nebraska. The area around Bassett, NE looked promising with good low-level shear. We headed out around 1:30 and took highway 44 to 183. The lack of Alltel broadband coverage between Amherst and Taylor was quickly apparent to us, so we didn't have radar or status updates for quite a while. According to the Alltel coverage map, all that area should have had internet, and the white area north of Taylor should had been the dead area. The opposite was true. I will have to talk to Alltel about this...
We arrived in Bassett around 4:00, and since storms had not begun in the area, waited around for quite a while to see if something would happen. Benjamin kept watching the radar, hoping something would pop in the area. Some locals stopped and asked us what kind of weather we were expecting. A guy who works as an EMT at the Bassett hospital talked with us for a while and gave us a map of the county roads in the area. He warned us not to go down some of them if we didn't want to get stuck. We were assured that they'd be there for us if we got hurt on our chase. We got a photo of him (third from the left) and the other guys who stopped by to chat. They suggested we grab a beer before we went after the storm, but we declined.
Basset, Nebraska locals - sorry guys, I don't remember your names.
A linear storm system came through, ruining our hopes of a seeing a tornado. At least we got good photos of the shelf cloud coming in.
Shelf cloud near Ainsworth, NE
Since my window had busted out on our last storm chase, we tried to keep the opposite side of the car on the windy side to keep the rain out. It worked most of the time. Some incredible lightning bolts struck not far from us when I didn't have my camera going, but we got a few good lighting photos.
The TCS team watches lightning light up the sky and landscape east of Bassett, NE
