Merger of storms helped form May 22 tornado

Amanda Kent manages the Payless Shoe Store in Pittsburg, Kan., but on the weekend of May 22 she switched jobs to manage the Payless store at 1502 S. Range Line Road.

As she watched the weather turn for the worse that Sunday, she got a call from her husband, Jason Kent, who works for the Jasper County Sheriff's Department.

"It's 5:43 p.m. He calls me and tells me to take cover now — a tornado is coming your way. He's heard this on his police radio," she said.

She and a co-worker take cover under a three-sided desk in an office at the rear of the store. She thinks that a tornado, if one does come, will probably be small.

"I'm hoping it's a skinny little thing that will shift away from us and miss us all together," she said.

What this 29-year-old mother of one was not expecting was an EF-5 tornado with wind speeds of 205 mph that would be three-quarters of a mile wide.

Meteorologists at the National Weather Service forecast office in Springfield and at the Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Okla., also were thinking that, should a tornado form near Joplin, it would be small. Weather conditions that day did not favor the production of a massive tornado. Nothing in their crystal ball suggested that. If one did form, it might be an EF-2, maybe an EF-3.

But what happened that day in the skies west of Joplin was totally unexpected. Two storm cells, a large one from Southeast Kansas and a smaller one from Northeast Oklahoma, would merge and, in a matter of minutes, produce a monster.

"We grabbed some shipment boxes and scooted those in front of the desk we were under," Kent said. "It wasn't 10 seconds later that things started shaking, rattling and falling. This is what I thought would happen."

What happened next is what she was not expecting.

"The desk was lifted up and the boxes were blown away. We were exposed on the ground a second or two. I was lifted into the air. My eyeglasses were blown off. I'm blind as a bat without them.

"I was then upside down in the air. I was swirling around. My feet were above my head and my ballet flats were flying off my feet," she said. "It was a slow-motion deal. I was thinking: 'Oh my shoes!' It seemed like a long time, but it probably happened in two seconds.

"I'm thinking to myself and praying: 'God, please don't take me away.' I lost my mom at 21. I have a son who is 1 1/2 years old. I'm thinking: 'Don't let my son not have a mother.' It's way too early for him. He would not even remember me."

Kent, though pelted by debris and wood, survived. She pulled a piece of wood from her foot. She had another piece of wood pierce her side. Her right collarbone was fractured. Her co-worker, protected by debris that covered her, walked away with minor injuries.

Thirteen minutes after the phone call from her husband, Kent was in a pickup truck on her way to Freeman Hospital West. A teenage boy whose name she does not know stopped at the demolished store and gave her a ride. After receiving initial care at Freeman, she spent 19 days in recovery at Via Christi Hospital in Pittsburg. She is still being treated for the injury to her left foot.

Meteorologists still are trying to learn more about how a normal spring storm became a killer. They know that storm mergers occurred about 15 minutes before the tornado developed and that the mergers intensified the supercell that would produce the deadliest tornado since modern record keeping began in 1950.

They also know that observant radar operators in Springfield, without much evidence of a classic tornado hook on radar, detected rotation inside the storm and noticed that the main storm appeared to be making a gradual right turn. These important observations proved crucial for the 24-minute advance warning that Joplin received.