The most photographed tornado in history? Army of cellphone journalists documented storm
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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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It’s been a decade since a major tornado hit the Wichita area, and during that time, technology has advanced — to say the least.
On Friday night, just after a tornado ravaged the Andover area, social media was suddenly flooded with high-quality photos and videos from citizen journalists who’d spotted the twister outside their houses or captured it from their cars.
They appeared on Snapchat, TikTok, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, and they were just so good. Some showed closeups of the tornado on the ground, its devastating debris cloud in perfect focus. One showed crushed cars thrown against the outside of hard-hit Andover YMCA.
Another from inside the YMCA, shot just after the storm passed, showed falling ceiling debris nearly landing on someone. It was shared and shared and shared.
Videos appeared of the tornado crossing the highway just in front of cars. Groups of people who’d been participating in outdoor sporting events were photographed in parking lots, their phones all pointed skyward.
The images were so clear, and they appeared so quickly. The difference between this tornado and the last big one that hit Wichita in 2012 were stark. In the span of a few hours, an entire population of photojournalists was born.
Friday night’s tornado is no doubt the most photographed and videoed in the Wichita area’s history, and the fact that the majority of people now carry high-quality cameras in their pockets is only one of the reasons, say storm chasers and photo experts.
The time of day could not have been better for lighting the storm — the sun was low in the Western horizon, and it cast a golden glow on the swirling white cloud.
Plus, said Mike Smith, a retired meteorologist who has been photographing storms his entire career, this tornado was particularly photogenic.
“It was so unusual, and the radar is just amazing,” he said. “It was cored in a precipitation-free area. The tornado was hardly attached to the parent thunderstorm, and at one point, all you have is a debris ball. It was very easy to see and photograph.”
The storm was so clear, people could see it from Wichita. The owner of Angelo’s Italian Restaurant posted a video of the twister clearly visible from the parking lot at Central and Woodlawn. A citizen who’d been watching a performance at Southeast High School grabbed a crystal clear image from the parking lot there.
Before the sun even set, a man whose Andover house was leveled by the storm posted on his Facebook page a video that showed what was left, including shots of one of his cars balancing on top of the other.
Interestingly, Smith said, back in 1991, the tornado that devastated Andover was also labeled the most photographed in history — up to that point. One of the most famous images of the 1991 tornado was shot by Earle “Duke” Evans, who got out of the shower, grabbed his new camcorder and ran outside to videotape the massive storm.
“That was the camcorder tornado, and many people talked about how, at that time, it was the most photographed in history,” Smith said. “You might call this the smart phone tornado.”
Wichita Eagle visuals editor Jaime Green has been photographing tornadoes and their aftermath for her whole professional career. In fact, her first day on the job was the day of the May 3, 1999, storm that devastated Haysville.
She also was amazed by the number of high-quality images that appeared immediately after the storm. In the past, photojournalists were lucky to make it onto a scene in time to capture even one such image.
Many of the photos and videos she saw on Friday would be good enough to earn professional photojournalism awards, she said.
“I’ve spent my whole career trying to get a photo like everyone in Wichita got on Friday,” she said.
Nonetheless, Smith said, he wishes photography was not everyone’s first instinct when a dangerous storm is approaching. He’d prefer if they went indoors and took shelter.
But the photos that flooded social media, he said, may have at least persuaded people who saw them that the storm was serious and that they should take cover.
“I wish people would not go outside to look for the tornado,” he said. “But I don’t think we’re ever going to train that out of Kansas.”
This story was originally published April 30, 2022 at 1:25 PM.
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