Courtesy; Mike Umscheid
Logan County Emergency Management Director Richard Cook says Stapleton is a quiet town.
But, Tuesday afternoon it was anything but quiet as a tornado tore across central Nebraska fields.
It's a time of year when Nebraskans expect to see snow on the ground.
Instead, some saw tornadoes.
"My husband called and said you guys need to get to the basement, there's tornadoes in the area," Stapleton resident Polly Burnside said.
And there was, for the the first time ever in Nebraska in the month of February, we saw tornadoes.
Polly knows that firsthand after a touchdown tore across her farm.
"It's kind of a shock because you're just thinking we were really close to this tornado," she said. "It just missed us because it could have easily gone towards our house."
The tornado missed their house and their neighbors.
Cook called that luck.
"It skirted just west of the first house, a couple hundred yards east of the second house, and probably just that far east of the third house before the damage trail picked up," he said.
The only damage was an overturned pivot in the Burnside's field and downed tree branches.
"It happened very, very quickly," she said. "I remembered that I had cookies in the oven so I wasn't even down there a couple of minutes and I came back upstairs to get the cookies out, and I looked out my window and the pivot had already been flipped over."
National Weather Service Warning Coordination Meteorologist Teresa Keck said it all came from an unusual combination of conditions.
"Everything was just right there together at the right time," she said.
Her advice is to be ready.
"It's already arriving and if anything, start preparing for it," Keck said,
Burnside agreed.
"We were very lucky that God was protecting us because it could have been a lot worse," she said.
Fortunately no one was injured or killed during that Stapleton storm, and residents said they already have that minor damage under control.
