SASKATOON – Saskatchewan’s Greg Johnson and Team Tornado Hunter got up close and personal with a twister west of Oklahoma City on Friday.
With the death toll rising in Oklahoma and numerous tornadoes viciously ripping through the state, Johnson and the team are busy tracking the destructive giants.
On Friday, the National Weather Service issued a Particularly Dangerous Situation (PDS) for residents in the area to watch out for the possibility of dangerous tornadoes.
The trained professionals were caught off guard by a tornado that behaved extraordinarily abnormally that day.
Johnson’s had a few close encounters before but this time his team got a little too close for comfort when they literally ended up inside a tornado.
“You couldn’t get any closer, we were right inside of a mile-wide wedge tornado,” said Johnson.
As Saskatoon driver, Ricky Forbes, drove the team off the road into a ditch, Johnson says the tornado went right over top of them.
At one point, an entire farmyard of buildings flew through the air right in front the Tornado Hunter Truck. Forbes had to swerve back onto the road to avoid another truck landing on top of them.
They survived being pelted by debris and significant winds and are back tracking storms in the area.
The TornadoHunter.com team then uploaded this video of their ordeal.
“Prior to us getting caught like we did, we actually witnessed five separate funnel clouds, five separate tornadoes, touching down on the ground. Two of them were at one time and these two tornadoes danced around each other, it was unbelievable, the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” said Johnson.
“In the next couple weeks storm season’s going to fire up in Saskatchewan.”
Johnson said he will be heading back up to the province for prairie thunderstorm season which he expects to take place from mid-June to the end of July.
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