irrelevant. an 80-mile-per-hour wind gust will take shards of glass and broken boards and send it on down and hurt a lot of people. we need everyone out of there before that happens. thank you, chad, for that not terribly happy report. all right. terrifying reports tonight from storm chasers taken as a tornado touches town in oklahoma. twisters are ripping apart homes and two are confirmed dead. joining me now is reid timer, host of discovery channel s storm chasers. where are you now and what did you experience in the center of the storm? reporter: right now we are due east of shawnee and about 20 minutes ago we did see a tornado that crossed i-40. looks pretty intense. it was a rope tornado and that one moved off to the north. we re dropping south down to the red river. earlier we saw a tornado that was about a half mile wide in northwest oklahoma. seems like every single storm has a violent tornado underneath it. are you seeing any tornadoes now as you re driving south
i actually talked to him the night before the tornado and his little brother called me and said that he was trying to get home in it and that severe hail had hit his car and nobody had heard from him and that was roughly about right ten minutes after the tornado went through joplin. and i actually live in tulsa, and i was in my car on the way to joplin as soon as i got that from my youngest son. well, i hear that he was in the car with somebody else who has survive. is there any way to use that lead as a way to help track lance down? well, that lead was actually how we found the car, lance s car, and where a start point. before that, there were just massive searches in i mean an 8 block by 25 block radius. all my friends, my ex-wife s friends, my wife s friends, my friends, everyone was just looking for him. and through that kid being found at freeman hospital, we were able to locate the car, as soon as he came to, he got life flighted out of freeman hospital here in
vel a visual on that tornado in a matter of minutes. troy, big tornado amount ground here, tell us where you are now, northwest of tabler, northeast of chickasha? heading quickly to the south into that storm right now. i tell you what traffic is crazy on the roads. we just need to tell everybody, especially in oklahoma county to get off the roads therdç are a lot of emergency vehicles out here now going in different directions, that need to leave the roads open for them. we are going to be heading to the area in ten minutes or less, mike, i will give you an update then. jim gardner is rapidly approaching that area. folks in gut rib, good news for you, hope it stays that way, the circulation of that tornado he is rapidly decaying, involved in rain now, decaying. not staying is not going to be a rope tornado or a medium/small tornado that may happen. you are under a tornado warning that is the bottom line. tell you now go to the north doppler here, take a look, the circulation is ra
what s going on in joplin saying it s just unbelievable there. if they can even get internet service, so they may be hearing from relatives in other places and reporting on it. chad, what do you know? what scares me the most, don, about what we re about to see on this video i m afraid is coming in at this point in time, is that we had reports of the tornado being two miles west of joplin. one mile south of joplin. which is downtown center, not the city itself. the city is more than one mile across. and then three miles east of joplin on the ground. very large tornado. now, that tells me that this thing never did skip. in other words, this was not a small what we call rope tornado, dancing around the prairie. this was a very wide, possibly half mile wide tornado at the base, could have even been bigger than that, rolling through a major metropolitan area. maybe you ve never heard of joplin, missouri, but it s part of a tri-state area there, kaas, missouri, and oklahoma.
completely different category from a small rope tornado that dances along the plains to a storm that stay on the ground for a very long time. we had a major tornado, at least 150 miles per hour, and in some spots in its lifetime greater, rolled right through a town of between 50 in downtown to 150,000 people. we will see damage, we will see devastation like we saw in tuscaloosa as this video keeps coming in, don. the later we get into the day, the more video that s going to come in, it s not going to look like this anymore where power lines are still standing and power poles are still standing. we ll get to a point where video comes in that everything is leveled. that video is out there. we re getting ireports as well. don t put yourself in any danger. if you would like to send a report in, please do. if you re walking around out in joplin, missouri, there are boards with nails everywhere. some of the most devastating