What can we learn from the F-4 tornado that struck Haysville 25 years ago?

HAYSVILLE, Kan. (KSNW) – It is Severe Weather Preparedness Week in Kansas, and this year marks 25 years since the F-4 tornado hit the town of Haysville.

Chief Meteorologist Lisa Teachman shares with us what we can learn from it, how to be ready, and how to strengthen our homes.

An ill wind can change your life in a split second. You never want to think it could happen to you.
Haysville was struck twice by tornadoes in less than 10 years. The first in 1991. The second was in 1999.

All tornadoes leave a mark. Haysvillians are resilient. Rising from the ashes twice.

“We were watching tornado after tornado develop,” said Tim Marshall, Engineer/Meteorologist at HAAG Engineering.

One of those tornadoes 25 years ago hit Haysville head-on. That was May 3, 1999.

“Some days it seems like it was yesterday, and then other days it seemed like it was somebody else’s life,” said Tim Norton, former mayor of Haysville.

“It was a narrower track, but it certainly had, you know, intense. It was a mean tornado,” said Marshall.

The tornado developed near Wellington and tracked north into Haysville and parts of Wichita.

“I got a call from the dispatcher at the police department, said, ‘Oh mayor, the total station’s gone,” said Norton.

It was difficult driving around town that night. Power outages left the community dark, power poles were down, trees torn up, gas lines hissing. Debris and twisted sheet metal from Norland Plastics were ground zero near Haysville’s main intersection.

Hundreds of homes, several businesses, and a handful of churches were damaged or destroyed.

“The next day, we started plotting, you know, block by block, looking at the destruction and seeing what kind of rating it was going to get,” said Marshall.

Marshall is a structural engineer and storm chaser who helped determine the strength of the tornado. It was classified as an F-4 with winds estimated between 207 to 260 miles per hour.

Marshall says since that day, building codes have remained essentially unchanged.

“Building codes are on a minimum, to begin with. So houses are built pretty much like they were years ago. If anything, we’re not as strong,” said Marshall.

He says one thing you can do is strengthen your garage doors.

He says when wind is trapped inside a garage weakened by flying debris, the pressure can build, lifting the roof off and collapsing walls.

“We found that almost half of the initial failures were the garage door. If you have an attached garage, which a lot of people do on their house, but when that door blows in, now it pressurizes the inside, and that air wants to get out,” said Marshall.

If you are building a new home it is essential to make sure your framing is properly anchored something he says was not the case in some homes he surveyed and in others that were rebuilt.

“They were just putting the bolts in. No washers and nuts. That’s not going to do anything. I mean, come on. The house is not anchored then,” said Marshall.

Today the town looks much different than it did before the storm. A war memorial now stands with a new library in its historic district. None of this would be here if it had not been for the tornado.

“As bad as things are, and you look and go, we’ll never recover. There is a recovery like a phoenix, you know, you kind of rise up out of the ashes,” said Norton.

It is the heart of the people that makes a town and helps it come back from such a disaster.

Marshall along with several other scientists and researchers are working on a new enhanced fujita scale. There are thousands of pages of documentation to go through to narrow the focus. The scale from EF-0 to EF-5 will remain, but wind speeds will come down.

In addition, this will become a standard to be used across the board for all tornado storm surveys.

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