Storm Driven

Wildfires in Oklahoma and tornadoes in Kansas both fast moving. Most of the storms this day where moving at more than 50 mph. It was a tough but successful lucky day.

A mixture of Fall 2009 pictures from Oklahoma and Arkansas.

Check back as more pictures will be added to slideshow as they’re added to Flickr.

Video from an Arkansas trip.

Some flooding around north Tulsa and some distant lightning.

I got an earlier start to work Thursday morning and was able to catch a few lightning bolts, from the last cell to move through.

A few pictures from this years “Heatwave in the Heartland” event held every July in Tulsa.

Past years pictures can be found here

Plenty of lightning but the rain still interfered a little

Another attempt at capturing the International Space Station

The day started with a nice quiet morning drinking caffeine free coffee watching the sun shining from the east and clouds coming in from the west. Soon the quietness ended with hearing shots being fired. Positive they were not fireworks, I grabbed the scanner to gain some insight into what was going on. All I know as of now is that the shooter was caught, someone called TPD about being shot at, K-9 searched for a woman that ran from a car, the Tulsa County Sheriffs were handling the call with TPD help and they also had a meth lab at the same location.

Maybe the local media will cover it?

During the above events the rain moved in and stayed most of the day, which I knew could hamper the idea of getting strong enough storms to provide the lightning I was wanting during the fireworks, oh well good for the thousands of others who would rather not have any lightning. As the evening drew near I saw the storms struggling to build to the north of Tulsa as I headed towards downtown to find a different location to capture the fireworks and the downtown buildings. As soon as I got to the spot and started unloading I heard on the scanner that the fireworks would start early. After a quick setup I was good to go.

we got about halfway into the fireworks show and then it just stopped.

Shortly after the quietness I heard someone over the radio say that one of the trailers blew up. After 10 to 15 minutes and a few mentions of go and no go, it was officially cancelled. With the lightning making it’s way closer I decided to try and catch a lightning shot with some of the many personal displays going off to the north of me.

That didn’t really work out as good as I had wished. Next was to try and get more lightning shots over the downtown buildings.

That didn’t work out either but I did manage to get some on the camcorder at least. Next move was to follow the lightning to east Tulsa and try to get a strike on one of the towers out there.

That didn’t work out either so it was time to call it a night. While working on the pictures and this I’ve been listening to TPD officers having problems(burning eyes and throats) while blocking streets for a hazardous material fire at Envirosolve on S.W. Blvd. It’s odd how TFD doesn’t pass along information to TPD so officers know whats happening for sure instead of worrying about what danger they might actually be in. Good night