Trees down all over Lawrence after storm; meteorologist says harsh winds were likely a downburst

Post last updated at 3:51 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 1:

Trees were destroyed and damaged all across Lawrence in a storm late Wednesday. Thursday morning light revealed the extent and the collateral damage from felled limbs and branches.

But Rachelle Rasing Patterson, a resident of the Schwegler neighborhood, was already well aware of a massive tree that had fallen at South Park. She was visiting a friend who lives nearby Wednesday night when the storm hit.

Within the tree’s branches, her car is trapped. The road and her friend’s vehicle, too, are blocked by the massive tree that fell across New Hampshire Street between East 12th and East South Park streets and appeared to have taken another smaller tree down with it.

She said she reached out to Evergy last night — the tree had ended up twisted in some power lines, yet thankfully had not knocked out power to her friend’s home — and the city’s forestry division Thursday morning.

Rasing Patterson said she had seen crews cleaning up smaller branches around South Park. But as of Thursday afternoon, the road was still blocked and she had no inkling of when the “behemoth” tree might be removed.

Rasing Patterson wasn’t sure yet whether her home had any damage, but she’d texted neighbors to ask, and none could see anything major. She said she’s had to take a chainsaw out a few times already this year because some branches have come down.

“But we need an entire group of men with chainsaws,” she said. “… It would be nice if we could get some kind of a timeframe, but we get silence.”

“Our team had more than 200 requests for service today due to the storm last night, so we prioritized what we could tackle first,” Tyler Fike, horticulture and forestry manager for the city, said in an email via a city spokesperson Thursday afternoon.

“We were aware of the tree early this morning, but it appeared to be stable and not affecting a busy roadway. We prioritized other damaged trees that posed a greater safety hazard or were impacting higher volume roadways,” Fike continued. “As the day wound on, we realized that we were unlikely to get to it today and elected to engage our tree service contractor to clear the tree from the road.”

He said crews got onsite and were working to remove the tree starting around 2 p.m. Thursday.

Damage was widespread across town.

Robert Bieniecki, director of Douglas County Emergency Management, said there were 40-plus reports of trees or limbs down, 12 reported power lines down, 14 reports of arcing power lines and two reports of traffic signals out. They did not receive any reports of injuries, he said.

The city is canceling its city-load compost event set for Saturday and will instead open the compost facility to Lawrence residents only for storm debris dropoff. Find details about that in the article at this link.

Around 11 p.m. Wednesday, there was a report of a tree down across U.S. Highway 40 near East 700 Road blocking traffic from both directions. Lecompton Township cleared all debris from the roadway, George Diepenbrock, a spokesperson for the sheriff’s office, said Thursday.

Diepenbrock also said a tree had fallen on a motor home at Coneflower Campground, near Clinton Lake, at 1:43 a.m. Thursday. “The owner was OK, and it appeared the tree only damaged the ladder,” he said.

In addition, East 1750 Road is closed between North 1500 and North 1400 roads — some of the East Hills Business Park entrances — until utility crews can get there to repair power lines and power poles.

A downburst

Some have speculated that the strong wind gusts that accompanied the thunderstorm may have been a microburst.

Sarah Teefey, meteorologist with the National Weather Service office in Topeka, said that “Right now I would classify it as what we call a downburst — wind gusts similar to a microburst except a little bit bigger in coverage. It was likely just a strong updraft from a thunderstorm that came down and pushed out from that thunderstorm.”

Wind gusts reached between 70 and 80 mph, and the NWS’ rain gauge at the Lawrence airport showed the area received .63 inches of rain in the storm, Teefey said.

She said temperatures would likely stick around the mid-90s, but “right now we’re looking dry through the weekend.”

(A downburst is like a microburst, but bigger. But it isn’t quite a macroburst. Learn more about downbursts and other damaging winds on the NWS website at this link.)

Sirens did not sound amid the storm. Bieniecki said the outdoor warning sirens only sound when the NWS issues a tornado warning, “or when a local determination is made that a tornado threat to the area exists.”

“The emergency management on-call duty officer makes the decision to activate the sirens,” Bienicki said. “… Except for the monthly tests, the outdoor warning sirens are used to signal a ‘take cover’ warning.”

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Dozens of fire calls

Lawrence-Douglas County Fire Medical’s PulsePoint app showed reports of more than three dozen fires all over town in a span of just a few hours late Wednesday night and early Thursday morning. Altogether, responders on that 24-hour shift were dispatched to more than 100 calls, according to a social media post from LDCFM.

“When operations get stressed like they did last night (with hundreds of 911 calls) incidents get rapidly triaged into a ‘fire’ bucket or an ‘EMS’ bucket for tracking,” LDCFM Chief Rich Llewellyn said via email.

The department had a battalion chief at the county’s Emergency Communications Center to help triage the incidents and guide the assignment of apparatus to respond to each call, Llewellyn said.

“We work to assign crews to incidents based on the triage process individual units will be assigned to a ‘holding’ incident as soon as they are cleared from another response,” Llewellyn said. Some of the later calls were classified more specifically as wires down, fire alarms, or wires arcing, he said.

The actual fires that LDCFM saw late Wednesday “were fairly minor and not significantly damaging,” Llewellyn said. “An example of a ‘typical’ fire from last night was in the 1900 block of Melholland where a tree was against a power line in the back yard of a house and was smoldering a branch where it contacted the wire with a small flame visible from time to time.”

He said crews try to clear incidents as quickly as possible so they can respond to the next incident during those kinds of operational conditions.

“As always, our priority is life safety so incidents that have potential life safety concerns (based on the 911 call) will receive a response sooner than one that doesn’t,” Llewellyn said.

Llewellyn said the department didn’t see any serious injuries from the storm, among community members or first responders.

“One of our battalion chiefs had a close call when a tree came down on Kentucky as he was driving,” he said.

Spokespeople for the Lawrence Police Department had not yet responded to emails asking whether they received any reports of storm-related crashes or injuries.

Lacee Roe, community engagement director for the Lawrence Community Shelter, said there were no reports of damage at the Pallet shelter village, the community of 50 small cabin-like structures that are sheltering people experiencing homelessness on North Michigan Street.

Related coverage:

Mackenzie Clark (she/her), reporter/founder of The Lawrence Times, can be reached at mclark@lawrencekstimes.com. Read more of her work for the Times here. Check out her staff bio here.

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