Re : Zelfde tornado, chasers midden in de hel.

What was at first an exciting day quickly transitioned into a sobering experience for a lot of storm chasers in Mississippi yesterday. Jesse Risley, Brad Goddard, Kevin Crawmer, Joel Taylor, Reed Timmer, Chris Chittick and many others are nothing short of heroes. They were the first on the Yahoo City, MS aftermath scene and rescued several people from their homes by digging through debris to get to them and keeping them alive until EMS arrived. The storm chasing community should be extremely proud of these individuals for their efforts. Dick McGowan

"Still not easy to talk about this one....very bizarre day from the start as we were on our first tornado warned storm at 7:30am. Jesse Risely, Brad Goddard, and I stayed on this storm until we decided to let it go since it was flying away. We spotted some storms in LA moving into some incredible, insane, scary, insert your superlative here dynamics. I think we knew what was going to happen, but didn't expect to see what we did. We started what was over an hour journey southwest to make an intercept at Yazoo City. An intercept is what we got...unfortunate for the people of Yazoo City. We drove south through the town several minutes after the Tornado Emergency was issued. It was surreal hearing the NWS guys breaking in and giving the Tornado Emergency announcement in real time while no one seemed to care or know what was going on inside the city. Business as usual. Afterward we had various reports of sirens only being heard only a couple minutes ahead of time. Anyways, after passing south through the city we knew that we wanted no part of messing with this storm. We got well south and inched north as we felt was safe/appropriate. We got some pictures and video, but to be honest fight or flight kicked in and we spent most of the time telling people to turn around and eventually stopping traffic all together on Hwy 49. After it passed we ventured into town and that video can be seen on Convective Addiction's website. Reed, Joel, Chris, etc had just arrived on the scene as we were looking for anywhere to help. My hat is off to those guys because they put everything on hold and went into full search and rescue mode. Very refreshing to see this and the public needs to realize how much these guys care. We all helped dig people out and with my medical background I was able to backboard several people including a guy with a suspected broken back/paralysis and a woman with a shattered pelvis. Both were life flighted out of the area, but only after we had to carry them for what had to be a half mile through fallen trees and obstacles of powerlines and other debris. There were many others that were injured including elderly and infants. Completely heart breaking. What was amazing and still brings tears to my eyes is not a one of them gave any indication that they realized they had just lost everything. Very sad. My group helped for three hours and at that point several other communtities had pitched in and we felt more in the way than an aid. My prayers go out to those people and I hope we have some fundraisers to help the state of MS (Storms of???). Kevin Crawmer"