6A THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
NEWS
MONDAY, MARCH 13 2006
David Noffsinge/KANSAN
Employees of the Replay Lounge sit in the aftermath of high winds Sunday morning. Several downtown businesses lost windows and had other damage done to buildings and sions.
Students dodge disaster
BY ANNE WELTMER
AND MIKE MOSTAFFA
editor@kansan.com
KANSAN STaff WRITERS
Travis Warner, Manhattan senior, escaped the heavy winds and swirling clouds that tore through Indiana street Sunday morning, but his truck didn't.
"The irony is lawny wanted to see a tornado; now I missed it and it hit my truck," he said after a 40-foot-tall tree completely smashed the cabin of his Black Dodge Dakota Sport and filled the bed with branches in the Oread Heights parking lot at 1140 Indiana.
Warner and other University of Kansas students' lives were disrupted Sunday morning by a storm with winds from 70 to 90 mph. Those winds wreaked havoc on houses, apartments and vehicles throughout the neighborhoods around the University.
Robert Zwolinski, Chicago
sophomore, had never experienced a tornado storm. The entire house was shaking when he heard the loud boom of a giant tree uprooted and struck his 1339 Tennessee apartment.
He said he made a dash for the building's basement. The entrance to the basement was outside the building, and clad in pajama pants and a large coat, Zwolinski sprinted to the building's basement.
Kris Keckler, Gardner senior,
lives in an apartment at 1333 Tennessee
and gets up at 8 a.m. every
Sunday to go jogging.
Keckler said she had seen what she thought was a tornado touch down in a space between her house at 1335 Tennessee and her neighbor's house at 1335 Tennessee. She said that she was glad she didn't go jogging today.
Ted Henson, Kansas City senior, lives at 1339 Tennessee had his 1995 Chevy Cavalier smashed by a large branch.
Henson's apartment was upstairs and with no basement, he and a friend who spent the night didn't feel safe.
"We hit the floor; we didn't know what to do," he said.
Two cars around Warner's also were hit by the tree. It poked a hole in the back window of a light gold Nissan Altima and splintered the spoiler of a gold, two-door Honda Accord.
The only thing on Warner's mind at the moment was midterms. He said most of his homework and study material was in his car, which he can't get in to. Warner said that he had many good memories in the truck, including the first time he made out during his freshman year in high school.
"Next time you see me I'll have a sweet 2003 Nissan Sentra. It will be awesome," Warner said.
— Edited by Lindsey Gold
A street light lays on the ground next to the intersection of 11th and Massachusetts in downtown Lawrence. The high winds damaged several street lights in the downtown area.
WHAT
A tree sits on Manhattan senior Travis Warner's truck in the parking lot of the Oread Heights apartments at 1140 Indiana Su
Megan True/KANSAN
Wichita senior Greg LaRue takes photos of the KU soccer team's bleachers that were twisted and destroyed by tornado-like winds early Sunday morning while Wichita sophomore Abby Pastore looks on. Pastore said they had decided to go out and look at the damage caused by the winds and were amazed at the wreckage.
David Noffsinger/KANSAN
The high-speed winds left such a path of debris and destruction across Lawrence that Douglas County Commissioner Bob Johnson declared a state of disaster at 10:35 a.m.
Storm
Mark Cairns, duty officer for Douglas County emergency management, said it looked as if two storm cells combined over Lawrence to create the microburst. He said this type of storm was very unusual.
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1A
The storm hit Lawrence near 31st and Iowa streets and moved east. The city and campus were left needing to be cleaned of the shingles and tree limbs that covered the streets. The storm
After the storm, Douglas County Emergency Management thought the city's siren system was inoperable because an antenna on top of its control
Jonathan Holley, Topeka graduate student, said that by the time he heard a siren, a tree had crashed into his living room and an electrical box had exploded in an alley next to his house at 945 Vermont St.
The city contacted its siren company, Blue Valley Public Safety, to determine if the alarms had been sounded and if any needed repair. The company found that 30 of the 32 sirens in Douglas County had gone off successfully with the other two still uncertain.
Officials will start a damage assessment of the city at 8 a.m. today. The assessment crew's findings will determine if Lawrence is eligible to receive federal aid for areas with the most damage.
Several residents reported not hearing sirens until after the storm hit.
also caused street lights to stop working and power lines to fall in the street.
"The sirens were late," Holley said. "I walked outside and the storm was already over."
Smith said the city had no plans to remove heavy debris such as fallen trees from yards. She said residents were accountable for private property damage.
center in the Douglas County Courthouse had been damaged. No signal was received telling the agency the sirens had successfully sounded.
The American Red Cross set up a shelter at First Baptist Church, 14th Street and Kasold Drive, to supply lodging and food for those without power. The shelter closed after receiving only one visitor in five hours.
A city crew will begin collecting debris at 7 a.m. today. Smith said residents should separate woody debris from all other debris and place the material at the curb.
Damage was extensive across many parts of Lawrence. Businesses such as Weaver's Department Store, 901 Massachusetts St., Lawrence Internal Medicine, 3310 Clinton Parkway Court, and Buffalo Wild Wings, 1012 Massachusetts St., all lost of parts of roofs and suffered damage to store signs.
Many of the University's buildings also suffered from the storm. Sidewalks were littered with red roof tiles and broken tree limbs. Both campus buildings and cars parked in campus lots had windows that were broken either from the intense winds or falling debris.
Templin Residence Hall was one of the buildings on campus that was hit the hardest. The air conditioning unit on the roof of the hall was blown off and lay as a mangleed piece of metal on the
.
front lawn. Many residents' cars were crushed by falling pieces of the roof.
Karla Olsen, a spokeswoman for Westar Energy, said that as of 9:30 p.m. Sunday about 5,000 Lawrence residents were still without power. She said that at the peak of the storm, about 38,000 homes didn't have power.
"We've made really good progress, but these last ones may be the most difficult," Olsen said.
She said the company had 164 workers out in the city working to get all the power restored, which she said could happen by this evening.
- Staff writer, Kristen Jaboe contributed to this story.
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