By BECKY KISER
Hays Post
GOODLAND – An intense thunderstorm early Thursday evening in western Sherman County uprooted large trees, caused flooding, broke numerous power poles, destroyed a barn and flipped over four semi-trucks on Interstate 70 west of Goodland. One of the semis toppled onto a car.
Fortunately, there were no serious injuries reported, according to Sherman County Sheriff Burton Pianalto, even to the seven people in the crushed car.
Pianalto watched the severe weather come in about 5:20 p.m. Mountain Time. Afterwards he and his deputies surveyed the damage along Highway 24 and in the I-70 rest area about 12 miles west of Goodland. Without electricity, the rest area had to be closed overnight by the Kansas Department of Transportation.
At least 30 electrical power lines were downed along Highway 24 and two cars were damaged by them, according to Pianalto.
“The electrical current actually blew their car windows out,” Pianalto said Friday morning. A power distribution station was “obliterated.”
Deputies were out again Friday morning surveying the damage. Four state game wardens helped check on rural residences Thursday night. Many of the roads were flooded. A trailer house next to the destroyed barn, which was unoccupied at the time, suffered damage.
Although he hasn’t yet heard from the National Weather Service in Goodland, Pianalto thinks the damage came from powerful straight-line winds.
A pickup driver pulling a camper got off I-70 into the rest area to sit out the storm. Afterwards he told Pianalto the wind lifted both the pickup and camper off the ground and blew the camper over onto its side.
Another driver whose passenger window was blown out was pelted by pea-sized hail. “He had little pock marks on his arm. The hail had to come in almost horizontally to strike him.”
The rest stop still had a carpet of hail when Pianalto arrived. In a live Facebook post he noted several large trees uprooted, an air conditioner ripped off the building, and tin tangled in a tree.
Midwest Energy (MWE) sent crews from Sharon Springs, Goodland, Colby, Oakley and Hoxie to the area last night, along with with two crews from Hays and two from Great Bend Friday to get power restored to nearly 400 customers. As of 9 a.m. Friday, there were still 150 customer outages, according to MWE spokesman Mike Morley.
“We estimate about two dozen of those are residences with the rest being pumps, fence chargers and sheds. We’ve found 32 poles down between Kanorado and Ruleton, and a group of 12 poles down in two spots west of Sharon Springs. We hope to have all residential back on today,” Morley announced on the MWE Facebook page.
The forecast is calling for another “significant threat of severe weather” in the Goodland area again today.
Once he gets back from more damage surveying, Pianalto said he “has a conference call with Goodland (National Weather Service) this afternoon.”
Round 2 may be on the way.