Author: Doug

One of the reasons that this site has been slacking for month is due to the time I put towards Facebook and updating and pretty much screwing around on Facebook and wasting hundreds of hours this year on it.

Well, I sat back last week and said WTF, WHY?  I have this website that really needs my attention and the BNVN website that needs updating and new videos posted to it.

Both of my sites have RSS feeds and I have Twitter so why the hell was I wasting so much time on Facebook?  Don’t know but I quit Facebook for personal stuff and will only have my Fan Page for a prescience on Facebook for BNVN and people that might see me on TV and who use Facebook.

I’m working on this site and working to get the Twitter feeds on the site.

or

http://www.twitter.com/stormchasingvid

So if you were a friend on FaceBook and wondered WTF happened to me on what I love to call Crack Book, I’m off of it and spending time working on my webpages, not wasting time on their website.

Looking at the tropics, I waited until this morning to call the “go / no go” for the Hurricane Earl chase.  While I would love to go intercept land fall of a major hurricane again since it’s been since Hurricane Gustav in 2008 that I was in the tropical systems, Earl is not going to be the storm to chase.

Reason’s why, the eye or center of Hurricane Earl is now on several computer models forecast to remain way off shore.  The area of interests to serious hurricane chasers is the right front quadrant of the hurricane where the most violent winds are.  This area will be nowhere near land as it passes by the east coast until it moves up into Canada. 

Most major areas of impact in the United States such as the Outer Banks of North Carolina and the Cape Code area of Massachusetts’s are well removed from the center and the latest forecasts show that the storm passage will be during the overnight hours where you won’t be able to see much of anything.  Sure their will be some waves and rain, but it will not be a major system that will do much damage to the area’s the media is hyping up right now.

So with no landfall until the system hits Canada this weekend where it will have weakened significantly by then, I’m sitting this storm out and waiting for the next system, Tropical Depression Nine (TD9) that formed this morning off the coast of Africa.

It has been a while since I updated my personal site so here is a run down. 

I’m working on updating the page so I have been posting updates on my FaceBook.com fan page.

I went storm chasing this weekend around central Minnesota and got on a couple of crazy storms.

On Friday night we caught the storms south of Saint Cloud, MN

On Saturday, we ended up chasing another storm in southern Minnesota around Lyon County near Marshall, MN. 

On Sunday we went the the air show in Saint Cloud, MN and watched some pretty sweet planes.  I have not posted the photos here yet since I’m working on the site update but the photos are on the Facebook fan page.

Just getting caught up after an insane couple of days.

Just the short version here.  Been working on http://www.BNVN.com stuff and working behind the scenes to finally update this site.    Thursday I had plans in St. Paul from 1:30 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. and these plans could not be changed and were setup weeks ago.

Once I was finished I was able to get out to chase and ended up heading out west of the metro area and followed the line of storms up north from the Howard Lake, MN area up to Monticello and ended up in Pine County, MN where the tree’s made it impossible to chase.  I swore that as soon as I got to the St. Croix River, I would stop since I was not going to try and chase into Wisconsin.

I did end up shooting footage and here is the video:

Pine County, MN which is south of the city of Duluth, MN, a violent tornado hit the area just east of Pine City, MN along the Minnesota and Wisconsin boarder. The tornado injured several people and destroyed one home and damaged another along Highway 70.

Back in July of 2004, we shot footage of an explosive storm sewer on Interstate 35W and 35th street in Minneapolis, MN.  

Since then we have been getting requests for another video that was shot by a traffic camera in 1999 of the same thing happening and causing an accident.  After a lot of searching, we finally found the footage. 

This video from 07/03/1999, from the traffic camera on Interstate 35W and 35th Street catches the explosive storm sewer happening several times over a few minutes and even has the accident caught on tape where a pickup truck drives into a massive storm sewer cover that was blown off the opening. The storm sewer would get large amounts of air trapped in the system during heavy rain causing it to push the water back up the storm sewer system and exploding straight up in the air like a geysers. 

I also found the video form the tower camera that shows me driving up to the exploding sewer on 7/11/2004.

Hey everyone, it has been a busy past week for me running BNVN.  While I have not been out chasing and don’t think I have drove my Jeep more then 15 miles in the last 2 weeks, I have been working on another new website to launch this week along with working on a lot of stuff behind the scenes for this site and for BNVN.com.

We (the BNVN crew) hsa been very busy with chasing and I have been very busy stuck in the office, which is a good thing, no a great thing, considering last month was deader then DEAD.  Sorry I have not posted a lot of the BNVN stuff on my personal blog but I have been trying to get the BNVN site to take over all of the stuff for BNVN.  You can check out all the new videos at www.bnvn.com and you can also follow us on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/stormchasingvid

I have about a weeks worth of work to do on the new chasing site and then I’m going to launch it.  Lots of stuff to encode and links to verify. 

I’m also going to start working on this site soon and get the photo gallery and stock photo pages up to date and on line.

Well, it is 4:15 in the morning and I need to get some sleep.

Later

Looks like someone got a leaked copy of the clean video that Scott Weberpal shot yesterday and I took care of the video sales for him.  They reuploaded it to their own YouTube account and it got linked by The Drudge Report.  Check out the second link on the down on the left that says VIDEO: Multi Vortex at Wakita, OK…  http://www.drudgereport.com/ 

Wow, part of me is kind of pissed that someone got the clean footage and uploaded it but damn, the footage got linked by Drudge which is hella cool.  Below is Scotts video on our Youtube Channel.

I started writing this blog about ten hours ago and it has been one crazy night.  I wanted to write an update since I have not updated my blog in a few weeks.

So what kept me from getting this blog update posted for so long tonight?  I was busy following the storms down south and taking care of video feeds.

While following the storms tonight, I saved two radar scan images from the Ashland, MS tornado this morning. This storm was just crazy looking on radar. 

The above radar images show a very powerful storm that moved over Ashland, MS.  I found the following storm report from the Memphis, TN National Weather Service office.

0246 AM     TORNADO          2 E ASHLAND             34.83N 89.14W
05/02/2010                   BENTON             MS   TRAINED SPOTTER

            DAMAGE FROM A POSSIBLE TORNADO EAST OF ASHLAND. LOTS OF
            DEBRIS IN THE ROAD. A TRAILER IS MISSING WITH PEOPLE
            UNACCOUNTED FOR. SPOTTER ALSO REPORTED HEARING FRIEGHT
            TRAIN SOUNDS WHILE IN STORM SHELTER IN ASHLAND.

That sounds pretty bad and at this time the area is under the gun again with another line of storms hitting them.

So, what else have I been doing?  With saving for school and paying off stuff, I won’t be chasing that much they year unless it is local chase with a few hundred miles from home.   I did get out on Friday for a local hail and lightning chase.  I drove up to the north of home to Sauk Centre, MN and watched the hail fall that covered the ground and did another lightning photo. 

I did get to finally do one of the shots I wanted to do for a few years now.  You have heard of Golf Ball Sized Hail?  Well, here is “Golf Course Sized Hail” with the green on the golf course covered in hail.

And now onto our Saturday adventure.  Neva and I helped out Saturday morning to clean up a part of Highway 10 that one of her clients adopted.

We ended up picking up almost 50, yes FIFTY bags of trash in just about three miles of roadway which is really only mile but you have to remember their is the sides of the road and the center ditch that had a lot of trash in it.  We found some strange stuff and some nasty stuff but now that part of the roadway is a lot cleaner.  

I have just been informed that the show we worked on a while back where I was in front of the camera and helpd out behind the scenes, called “Tornado Road” is now airing world wide on Discovery Channel and Quest. 

Here is the promo video on YouTube from Discovery Netherlands.  

This was some great unexpected news.

Doug

I was out early this morning near Litchfield, MN to document the lightning. 

Here are the photos from the chase.