Here’s why Newton got hit hard by weekend storm that damaged schools, dropped trees
The Newton school district and city public works continued digging out Monday from a weekend storm that a government meteorologist described as a giant water balloon pelting the city.
The storm, blowing 60-70 mph winds Friday night, littered streets with tree limbs and peeled the roof off the school district’s maintenance and storage building, causing equipment and supplies to be inundated and ruined. The storm also peeled brick facing off a school gym.
At the school district’s maintenance building, “There’s a lot of damage and things that we have to throw away and unfortunately that’s also where we house a lot of stuff,” district spokeswoman Samantha Anderson said. “One of the guys said, ‘Don’t ask for any paper, we don’t have any right now because it got destroyed.’”
“Maintenance is usually the people that fix all this stuff, but now they’re the ones having to have everything fixed,” she said.
The storm also peeled away decorative brickwork on Lindley Hall, the gymnasium at the district’s fifth and sixth grade school, revealing the structural brick underneath. What remains of the lettering on the building now says “HA L”
Post-storm radar analysis showed that what pounded Newton harder than the rest of the Wichita area were two lines of storms stretching from Stafford County in the west through Marion County in the east, said National Weather Service meteorologist Chance Hayes.
“These storms just kept firing right along that line and just kept continuing to train or move over the same areas,” Hayes said. “A lot of times when you see that happen, you get these microbursts or downbursts that occur within the storm.
“Just think about it as like a huge water balloon just descending from the clouds to the ground and when it hits it just causes a significant amount of damage.”
The high winds moved the storms across the city, causing more extensive damage, he said
“If the storms are slower, that damage is going to be pretty much isolated within a certain radius of where that downburst hit, but if it’s a progressive storm, you’re going to see basically a wind track similar to that of a tornado where you actually get damage that will actually move and progress with the storm itself,” he said.
Rain gauges on the north side of Newton showed 7 to 9 inches of rain, said City Hall spokeswoman Erin McDaniel. “It was really spotty,” she said. “On the south and west side of the town, they only got two inches.”
The city’s public works department had to pull workers from ongoing street resurfacing projects to deal with toppled trees and large broken branches that made it hard to get around over the weekend, she said.
By Monday afternoon, most of the deadwood had at least been pushed aside. “Streets are pretty clear at this point,” McDaniel said.
“Tomorrow our crews will be collecting the tree limbs along the street resurfacing routes, the streets that were already scheduled to be resurfaced, so that we can move ahead with those projects,” she said. “Wednesday we’ll start with the citywide pickup. We’re going to start on the north side of town and work south. Our crews will pass down every street and collect the limbs that are piled up at the curb.”
Neither the city nor the school district has an overall dollar damage estimate yet.
This story was originally published June 28, 2021 at 7:00 PM.
