By MIKE COURSON
Great Bend Post
Straight-line winds or a tornado? Sunday evening at 6:15 p.m., the National Weather Service in Wichita issued a tornado warning for Barton County and the city of Great Bend after a possible radar-indicated tornado moved through the city limits. Sheriff Brian Bellendir said no official cause of widespread damage has been determined.
"It's still open for debate whether this was straight-line winds or we had the possibility of a tornado that didn't quite touch down," he said. "At one point, the National Weather Service issued a tornado warning for a radar-indicated tornado over Great Bend but we don't know for sure. It's going to take some time to assess the damage. Someone will probably fly over it and see if they can tell."
The city of Great Bend tested its tornado sirens on Tuesday. Because of the timing of Sunday's storm, the sirens did not go off. Large hail began to fall on the area just before 6 p.m., and winds picked up considerably before the tornado warning was issued.
"I don't know what happened for sure," Bellendir said. "When I heard there had been a radar-indicated tornado, I called dispatch and told them to cycle them and it didn't happen. Something happened there, we don't know. It may have been, too, that we had no power already. That said, when the Weather Service called, we were already in the thick of the storm. There may have been power lines down before they ever warned us. If you don't have any power to those sirens, they aren't going to work."
Bellendir and deputies saw widespread damage around the county. Approximately a mile of power poles were snapped off on Northeast 20 Road north of Great Bend.
"It looks like this kind of followed US-281 south," said Bellendir. "I don't think Hoisington had much damage. I think they had some limbs down. But the further south and closer to Great Bend you got, the more damage you're seeing. We're seeing whole trees that were completely uprooted. They're not broken off. I probably saw 50 trees last night. We've had kind of a wet year and the ground is soft, then you've got these 80-90 mile-an-hour winds on these trees and it just pushed them over and uprooted them completely. I've seen that happen before but not this number of trees."
Bellendir urged the public to remain cautious as clean-up begins. Do not go out if it can be avoided, and be safe when using generators.
"We've got a ton of downed powerlines all over town, so be wary of those," he said. "At some point, they're going to try to energize this system. You don't want to be in contact with any of that stuff when they energize."