Day after record-setting Kansas storm: Wildfires are still burning, cleanup underway

Wildfires continued to burn Thursday as a vast swath of Kansas worked to clean up and restore power after high winds and dust ripped across the state Wednesday, setting records for wind speed and causing dozens of accidents. Three people died.

It’s not all that rare to have Kansas storms topple semis, snap power poles and peel off roofs, but it is rare to see damage so widespread. The strength and vastness of the storm was a weather phenomena that even surprised seasoned meteorologists.

“Right now it’s at the top of the list of the busiest and most extreme weather events in my career,” said Chris Jakub, a meteorologist for 21 years who is now with the National Weather Service in Wichita.

Evergy spokesperson Gina Penzig said the storm is the most widespread the utility company has responded to since it formed in 2018, and a Top 5 for the two companies that merged to form Evergy.

The company covers most of the eastern half of Kansas and part of western Missouri, providing power to 1.6 million customers. At the peak of Wednesday’s outages, around 200,000 customers were without power.

“We are literally working across the entire service area that we provide energy for,” she said.

In all, around 258,000 customers lost power. More than 60% of that had been restored by Thursday morning. Evergy has asked utility companies in neighboring states to come help.

She said it’s going to take multiple days to restore everyone’s power.

The storm started in western Kansas on Wednesday morning and roared across the state into the night.

Here is an overview of some of the aftermath:

Accidents

The Kansas Highway Patrol reported 73 accidents: 51 non-injury accidents and 20 with injuries. Three people died in two accidents. For comparison, there were two injury accidents Tuesday with no fatalities.

Two people died Wednesday in Grant County. The accident happened around 12:45 p.m. and involved multiple semis and a total of eight vehicles, according to a KHP dispatcher. The crash is still under investigation.

Wind gusts just minutes before and after the fatal crash were over 60 mph, according to the NWS.

A fatality in Haskell County happened after the driver of a semi rear-ended an SUV stopped in the roadway, killing the driver of the SUV and injuring a passenger, the Kansas Highway Patrol reported.

Trooper Mike Racy told the Associated Press that both fatal collisions were caused by low visibility from blowing dust.

Low visibility, high winds and accidents forced officials to close I-70 from Russell to Colorado.

Wildfires

Winds quickly spread multiple wildfires across the state.

The largest, which left a burn mark visible from space, burned in Russell, Ellis, Rooks and Osborne counties. A Russell County 911 dispatcher said Thursday morning that seven of the nine rural fire departments in the county were still fighting fires, most of which appeared to be rekindled flames.

The Kansas Forest Service estimates that about 366,000 of the roughly 391,000 acres that burned Wednesday afternoon were in the four-county fire. Satellite images were used to make the estimate, which is based on what burned Wednesday.

“Which is a big number for that short amount of time,” Kansas Forest Service spokesperson Mark Neely said.

The National Weather Service in Wichita said the Russell County sheriff reported at least 10 homes were destroyed in fires that stretched over 150 square miles.

The sheriff, who was out helping with fires, did not return a call from The Eagle.

In Trego County, at least four homes were destroyed along with numerous outbuildings, equipment and old homesteads, emergency management director Kathleen Fabrizius told the AP.

Fires were still smoldering Thursday in hay bales, power poles and big trees, the AP reported. Some of the fires were in remote areas.

“We can’t get to them because of the distance and because, frankly, we don’t have the resources to get there,” she said.

Video from the Lane County Sheriff’s Office showed a large burning wildfire that left train cars suspended in the air after the bridge below it burned. There were also fires in Sheridan, Ness, Rush and Wichita counties, according to the forest service.

Helicopters were sent to help fight fires across Kansas on Thursday, the Kansas Adjutant General’s Department said in a news release.

The fires caused unhealthy and moderate air quality to linger over a large part of the state, including Wichita, for most of the day Thursday, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The fires in west and central Kansas also caused Kansas City to smell like smoke.

Multiple GoFundMe pages have been set up to help people recoup some of their losses. One set up to help the Bar S Ranch in Paradise has already doubled its $10,000 goal. It says the family lost “their dogs, horses, hundreds and hundreds of cattle, everything in their house, vehicles, show barn, and the list could go on.”

Record winds

The winds in Kansas helped set a national record for most hurricane force thunderstorm wind gusts in a day since at least 2004, according to the National Weather Service Storm Prediction Center. The 55 gusts surpass the previous record of 53 on Aug. 10, 2020.

The highest wind recorded in Kansas appears to be 100 mph at the Russell Municipal Airport, the NWS in Wichita reported just before 4 p.m. Wednesday.

Early Thursday morning, the Wichita office tweeted that “wind records were smashed for the month of December since 1996 for central and south-central Kansas.” Besides the triple-digits in Russell, the highest report in the region was 95 mph east of New Cambria, outside of Salina. There were also multiple reports in the 80s. The highest gust measured at the Wichita Dwight D. Eisenhower National Airport was 69 mph.

Wichita and Chanute both set record high temperatures of 77, surpassing previous Dec. 15 records in the 60s set in 2006 and 1984, records show.

Among the damage

Baseball-size hail in Emporia was the largest reported across the state, according to NWS meteorologist Nathan Griesemer.

Some of the other reported damage:

• In Caldwell, the winds blew off part of the elementary gymnasium roof, forcing students to be evacuated and sent home, the Sumner NewsCow reported.

• Part of the Great Bend High School’s two-story roof above the auditorium blew loose, breaking off a gas line on an HVAC unit, according to school district spokesperson Andrea Bauer. Students, who were sent home early Wednesday, had the day off Thursday while repairs were being done. Bauer said the hope is to have the students back Friday before they leave for Christmas break.

• The roof blew off a Cold Stone Creamery in Dodge City, according to Jeff Johnson, a meteorologist at the NWS in Dodge City.

• Surveillance video caught a business in Hutchinson blowing over, according to meteorologist Jakub.

• The steeple of Trinity Lutheran Church in Great Bend blew over. A picture from resident Larrie Henning shows the steeple on the 1950 church still connected to the building while the top is bent and resting on the ground.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.

This story was originally published December 16, 2021 at 3:17 PM.