Preliminary damage reports put southeast Sedgwick County, Andover tornado at EF-3
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Tornado cuts through Sedgwick County and Andover, Kansas
An EF-3 tornado touched down in south-central Kansas on April 29, 2022, leaving damage in its wake, but few injuries. Residents in the Wichita area, Andover and Sedgwick and Butler counties are picking up the pieces.
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The tornado that tore through portions of southeastern Sedgwick County and Andover on Friday, flattening homes and collapsing parts of buildings including an elementary school and a YMCA, has been rated an EF-3, the National Weather Service in Wichita said Saturday afternoon.
The NWS shared the preliminary damage assessment in a tweet at 5:06 p.m.
“Tornado damage assessments will continue this evening and on Sunday,” the tweet said. Teams had been out surveying the damage throughout the day Saturday.
The weather service says the tornado first touched down in eastern Sedgwick County and traveled northeast into Andover. It then moved north toward Benton.
The twister was on the ground for 21 minutes — from 8:10 p.m. until 8:31 p.m., the NWS tweet says.
The National Weather Service did not say exactly how many miles the tornado traveled or give its width in the tweet. A meteorologist earlier in the day said the tornado was first reported in the area of south 127th Street and east 39th Street around 8:10 p.m. Friday. It cut a swath of destruction north of where the Kansas Turnpike cuts through Butler County.
Officials said Saturday afternoon that daylight revealed a damage path that was 3 ½ to 4 miles longer than initially thought.
The National Weather Service uses what’s known as the Enhanced Fujita Scale — or EF Scale — to categorize the intensity of tornadoes from 0 to 5 based on their estimated wind speeds and the resulting damage.
An EF-3 tornado is considered severe, with estimated wind speeds of 136 to 165 mph. Winds that high can overturn trains, rip roofs and walls off of well-built frame homes, collapse cellphone towers, uproot trees in heavily forested areas and lift heavy vehicles and structures not set on secure foundations off of the ground and toss them about.
By comparison, the tornado that leveled Greensburg in May 2007 was a EF-5.
This story was originally published April 30, 2022 at 6:03 PM.
