Covering tornado a highlight of newspaper career

The initial tornado watches and warnings 10 years ago were somehow different.

I had the day off that Friday and would be working Saturday night at the newspaper so my wife and I had gone to the store for groceries that afternoon. As we stood in the checkout line, we started hearing folks talking about a tornado warning and reports of a tornado to the south of Portales. Then my cell phone rang.

It was my immediate boss, David Stevens, who was on his way back to Portales from Albuquerque. He was concerned about what he was hearing about the weather and I confirmed things were starting to buzz in Portales. I don’t remember him saying the night off was cancelled, but I promised I would check things out and stay ready.

My wife and I both have pretty sharp recall of what occurred that night and, amazingly enough for an old married couple, all the important details we remember concur. We both agree looking back on it that we somehow knew things were different when we were standing in that checkout line.

The big news stories I’ve covered have always been that way — you knew instantly something big was happening.

We raced home and threw the perishables into the freezer and refrigerator and grabbed the police scanner and my camera gear. My wife refused to stay at home; she said if there was tornado coming she wanted to be with me.

We knew the tornado, or potential tornado, was between Portales and Dora so we went out the Dora Highway. Halfway to Dora we got into a violent storm with heavy hail and it got dark a little while before the sun had gone down.

When we started running into trained amateur storm chasers I knew it was serious. They were a little better connected than we were and told us it was probably going to pass west of Arch heading north and east.

The storm was rain-wrapped and the funnel was invisible from our side of the storm. I thought we might be able to turn around and get in front of it if we headed toward Cacahuate Road.

It was getting dark and the chances of photo were fading fast as we neared the U.S. 70 intersection with Cacahuate. We were too late to get around the storm; we could see power poles popping out toward the Portales well field and just south of Grande Vida Dairy. Instead of turning we kept going until we got out around the old Greyhound Stadium. About that time we noticed an abrupt switch in the wind direction and tumbleweeds, debris and sand was suddenly sucked like a big vacuum in the direction of Clovis.

I turned around knowing that a tornado I couldn’t see was on the ground ahead of us and headed for Clovis. It was time to get back and be ready to assist the Clovis team in covering whatever happened.

When I walked into the Portales office I found the two staffers I had working that night huddled together in the bathroom. I told them to get out of the bathroom and get ready to help Clovis as needed.

For the next 10 hours we struggled against power outages, Internet outages and high water to get a paper put together. Our Portales team didn’t get into the field until the next day but we all helped by catching what was thrown our direction from Clovis.

That night stands in the top three stories I had a hand in covering in a 30-year newspaper career. If I had been in the field in Clovis, it would no doubt have been No. 1.

Karl Terry writes for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at: [email protected]