More Andover Tornado Footage, This Time From School And City Hall

Snapshot from surveillance video at Prairie Creek 
Elementary School in Andover, Kansas shows
a tornado sweeping a car out of a parking 
lot on April 29 ,2022

 This is a mean thing to say, but last week's tornado in Andover, Kansas was one of the most photogenic twisters I've seen.  

It would have been better, of course, had it not caused such widespread damage.  Last week, I noted Reed Timmer's remarkable drone view of the tornado pulling apart neighborhoods and lofting roofs high into the air before raining debris over otherwise untouched parts of Andover. 

Now the surveillance video is coming out. The City of Andover has released footage of the tornado hitting a school, and skirting along the edges of City Hall property. Every tornado is unique and dramatic in its own way. This tall, skinny tornado seemed like a destructive oddball, but I guess every twister has their quirks.  It's just that this one was so visible to so many. That made it incredibly well documented.

With the videos, we'll start with the Prairie Creek Elementary School footage, since that's the most dramatic. Spoil: The school suffered severe damage, but no kids were in the school at the time as the tornado came through at about 8 p.m. Friday, April 29.

Here's that video, with some explanation below it.  If you can't see this video on you device, click on this hyperlink

The video:

This is some of the clearest surveillance video of a tornado I can remember.  It also illustrates why the wide open property around schools, and the larger rooms within schools, are not the place to be in tornadoes. 

It also shows why it's important to take shelter well before the tornado gets to near where you are. During the first 25 seconds of the video, we're waiting for the tornado to get there, but already, dangerous flying, fast moving debris is raining down.  Then the tornado hits, and quickly moves on to trash a YMCA building across a field. 

A second view, which looks like the front entrance to the school, starts just over one minute into the video. Although this footage turns pink for some reason, you can clearly see the lone car in the parking lot in the upper left of this segment take flight and exit stage left.  

A screen grab from surveillance video of a tornado 
trashing an elementary school lunch room in 
Andover, Kansas last Friday. 

There's another view of what I believe to be a different  viewed from a different angle at about 1:40 in to the video just disappearing as it's blown off to the right. There's an even clearer view of this car getting blown away.

The lesson here is, don't be like those storm chasers that sometimes try to drive into tornadoes. The car you're in can just turn into another airborne missile in a tornado, and you don't survive that. Nobody was in these two particular cars in Andover, fortunately. 

The last part of the video shows a neat and tidy lunch room getting trashed as a glass wall in the back caves in. 

The second video taken from Andover City Hall is a little longer and you can skip ahead during it if you are in a hurry. It shows a benign looking funnel in the distance. But it gets more and more menacing as it draws closer. 

The video is an illustration on how you should not be "confident" a tornado is going to miss you because of its initial direction.  As you can see it sort of goes right to left on the screen in this somewhat speeded up video.  At about three minutes into the video it looks like the tornado will miss City Hall by a wide margin.

But them its path curves back toward the building. It ultimately just misses the structure, but you can also again see how dangerous it is just to be near a tornado. The air fills with debris. Trees in the parking lot snap off and get sucked into the tornado'a maw. 

Click on this link to watch this video, or view below: