By MIKE COURSON
Great Bend Post
So far there have been few breaks for area first responders in July. After a busy Fourth of July weekend, the Barton County Sheriff's Office spent the early evening hours of Wednesday scoping out severe weather as it moved across the county.
"We were talking about that last week that we had not been out on a severe weather watch this year," said Sheriff Brian Bellendir. "Sure as heck, it pops up last night. Fortunately, I don't think we have any really serious damage. We have the typical power poles down, trees limbs down, some wind damage to carports and stuff like that. But we did have quite a few power poles down in rural areas by Ellinwood. It was blowing down whole sections of them."
Forecasts for Wednesday indicated only a slight chance of thunderstorms after 4 p.m., though given the high heat and humidity, powerful storms were a possibility. Albert was the first town to report significant weather with rain and hail.
'It was a pretty strange storm," Bellendir said. "We didn't really expect a lot of this to be coming in like it did. It was about 4:30 or 5 when we started seeing things pop up on the radar. It started getting dark out to the west. Myself and the command staff, and just about eveyrbody at the sheriff's office, we started heading out to look at things and keep an eye on it."
Just after 5:30, a storm that had been tracking northwest of Great Bend suddenly veered back over the city. It passed, only for an even scarier storm to pass through at approximately 6:30.
"Those storms moved in all different directions," said Bellendir. "I don't know if they were back building last night, or if it was just a confused state of weather. Typically, when they come in from the southwest they keep going to the northeast."
Just before 6:30, strong winds moved through Ellinwood, prompting local law enforcement to sound the tornado sirens. The storm uprooted trees, took down branches, and knocked down several power poles on the outskirts of town.
"I believe that was just the front of a storm coming in and they had straight winds," Bellendir said. "It got pretty wild over there for a while."
Bellendir also said the public can listen to severe weather-related traffic on scanners. Several free scanner apps are also available on most phones.
"We do still broadcast our car-to-car traffic and our emergency weather traffic on unencrypted channels so people in the community can listen to us," he said. "If you're listening to us, you'll know as soon as the Weather Service does."