Cheyenne Weather Service: Monday’s Storm the Worst in 30 Years
The National Weather Service in Cheyenne says last Monday's storm was the worst to hit southeast Wyoming and the western Nebraska Panhandle in decades.
"It certainly is a historic storm for us," said Meteorologist Chad Hahn. "We could go another 10 or 20 years and not see another event like this."
Hahn says 15 severe thunderstorm warnings and 23 tornado warnings were issued throughout the course of the day.
"The number exceeds the number of warnings that we've issued on any day in the last 30 years," said Hahn.
"As far as number of tornadoes, we have at least eight confirmed across southeast Wyoming and the western Nebraska Panhandle," he added. "There are a couple more that we'll likely add that we've seen videos of."
Hahn says three of the tornadoes were rated EF-2, including the one that touched down southeast of Carpenter. He says most of the tornadoes produced damage, but luckily only two people in Goshen County were injured.
"To some degree we were surprised that there wasn't additional damage, but given the rural area that we live in there's often not a ton of places to hit," said Hahn.
"These tornadoes, I guess as a large, weren't on the ground for all that long," he added. "In fact, the longest one that we saw was the Carpenter one which was on the ground for about 12 minutes."
Hahn says it's hard to estimate how much damage the storm caused, but it certainly wasn't indicative of what southeast Wyoming typically sees.
"It was an incredible day for sure," said Hahn. "We just don't see days set-up like that very often."