BARBARA BRANNON | CAPROCK COURIER
Spring storms bringing furious winds and a wide range of precipitation are nothing new to our rural parts of Texas on and off the Caprock Escarpment, but last Thursday evening delivered an especially wild weather ride—without wreaking serious damage most places.
Conditions ripe for thunderstorm supercells that afternoon drew storm spotters in droves.
At times along US Highway 62 from Briscoe County down into the breaks of western Motley, law enforcement had to remind chaser vehicles to pull far enough off the shoulder not to become hazards themselves. One reader estimated more than 75 of them along the route.
Caprock Courier readers from Silverton to Matador shared their images and experiences from around 6 p.m., when the sky was light enough to easily reveal menacing funnel forms extending to the ground.
Jenny Anglen of Quitaque described her trip home from Plainview: “On the way home we could see the dark storm cloud as it grew bigger. As we started north from 2286 on 378 heading up to 145 we started seeing storm chasers parked along the roadway watching the cloud. The last chasers we saw were on 145 at Briscoe County Road 13, not far from our house on the north side of 256 about 5 miles east of Silverton on the top of the Caprock between Briscoe County roads 18 and 19.”
All this meteorological mayhem kept ranchers and residents on high alert throughout the afternoon into the wee hours of Friday as numerous systems made their way eastward, starting with a rare cloud formation coming out of Floyd County into Briscoe County that spun backwards— rating the top of the weather page on the next day’s Washington Post.
“I knew Friday’s storm chase would be a wild one, but what I saw was still mind-boggling,” wrote WaPo storm chaser Matthew Cappucci. “Parts of the Texas and Oklahoma’s High Plains were hit with a barrage of tornado-producing supercells on Thursday. The rotating thunderstorms unleashed giant hail (up to 5.2 inches across) and tornadoes, including a rare one that spun the wrong way (clockwise) northeast of Lubbock.” The scientific term, he informed readers, is the Fujiwhara effect.
Motley County residents kept a nervous eye on that system, which seemed for a time to draw a bead on the towns of Matador and Roaring Springs, still recovering from the fast-moving, fatal twister of June 2023. A little ways up the road, where Bob Wills Day festivities were going on in Turkey, events carried on, moving indoors. But this one just took its slow time, lingering mostly in open country and prompting National Weather Service warnings after dark for counties to the southeast.
“Storm chaser reports indicate three tornadoes were on the ground simultaneously,” wrote Cappucci.
In the Dickens county seat, staff used a new remote activation system to unlock front doors to the courthouse annex building, whose central multipurpose room was constructed as a storm shelter. The plan worked without a hitch, said County Judge Kevin Brendle, though no serious threat emerged to persons or property there.
By then, a new storm system was pushing across from southeast Lubbock into rural Garza County north of Post, and for a while Spur looked to be the point of convergence for two separate systems. Storm warning sirens went off in both Dickens and Spur, and some residents also reported hunkering in closets of their own homes until the winds dissipated.
Katie Stevenson of Kalgary toldTheCaprockCourier their location had “mostly golfball sized hail, but some tennis ball as well” and more than 3 inches of rain.
The whole effect was enough to cause storm chaser Cappucci to describe the night as a “tornado-apalooza.”
With fields and brush country sufficiently drenched over the ensuing days for counties to lift burn bans, and road and bridge crews hauling out the road maintainers to repair washouts, the last week of April brought much-neededmoistureand comparatively little damage. But it sure brought the attention of weather watchers from far and wide.
