Wedge tornado hits Nebraska ranch

Rare tornado damages Cover family’s Sandhills ranch headquarters

A devastating tornado has destroyed much of Tim and Kathy Cover’s ranch headquarters, but it won’t crush their spirit.

On Sunday, April 27, at about 5:40 pm MT, a wedge tornado touched the ground in the far northeast corner of Garden County, Neb., and traveled twenty miles to the northwest, demolishing much of the Cover Ranch, west of Ashby, Neb., on Highway 2.

Of eleven buildings, barns, and shops, five remain standing. Four were taken down to the cement slab, two are without roofs, and the five remaining have minor damage. The ranch had over 100 trees, with only three left standing.

Tim and Kathy Cover (pronounced (KOH- ver) weren’t home when the tornado hit, but because of social media and storm chasers, who drove their vehicles onto “Cover Drive,” people across the region and even the nation knew the Cover Ranch had been hit by a tornado, said Crystal Cover, who is married to Chris, one of Tim and Kathy’s three sons.  

By the time the couple made it back to the ranch, neighbors were already there, checking on livestock and beginning the clean-up.

A few head of cows and calves were killed, but it could have been much worse, Crystal said. No one was injured or killed by the tornado, which included some hail and rain.

“The feedlot was full of cattle, and the funnel cloud was right there,” she said. “That’s the last place Clayton (Runkle, the hired man) saw the funnel before he headed to the basement. When we got there, we expected to have nothing left in the pens, but God spared us that day, and not a cow was touched at the feedlot.”

Heifer pairs were to the north side of the house, some with cuts and injuries.

“At first, we thought we fared well,” Crystal said, “but after seeing them (two days later), adrenaline is a good drug. They can mask a lot of pain with adrenaline. There are some hurt and cut up, and the calves have taken a good beating. When we rode through them (on April 29), more were showing signs of distress. The adrenaline wore off. That will be an everyday thing, there will be guys in the pens every day, trying to keep them healthy and as comfortable as we can.”

Crystal and Chris live twelve miles north of Tim and Kathy, and they were in their basement waiting out the storm before they could get to the ranch.

“Neighbors got there before we could,” she said, “because the tornado was between us and them. There were neighbors already in the pasture, saying, ‘I have my eye on this horse, he needs this or that,’ and by the time we got there, they were loaded in trailers and headed to town to the veterinarian.”

A good friend of Chris’ was there at daylight on, April 28, to ride pairs with Chris. “We doctored a handful of calves with bad cuts,” Chris said, “and gave them everything we could. It’s not over, and I’ve heard from people that it could be two weeks before the shock wears off on the cattle. They don’t look bad. I’m hopeful but I’m fearful at the same time.”

Buildings destroyed include Tim and Kathy’s house; the original house that Tim’s parents, John and Catherine, built when they bought the ranch in the 1960s; the new calving barn; the old shop, which was used to process cattle; the new shop, and the hangar. The bunkhouse sustained some damage.

The tornado flipped Wilson trailers on their tops. It took the semitruck and pot and spun it 180 degrees, tipping it into the trees. It took the roofs off the horse barn and calving barn.

One of the most heartbreaking losses is the loss of the trees.

“Kathy had hand-planted every one of them, from a size of a stick,” Crystal said. A row of a dozen pine trees behind the trailer house, planted 56 years ago, is destroyed.

And the ranch where the family gathered is gone.

“The west ranch (as this place was known) is the home place,” Crystal said. “We did all of our cattle processing there. It’s the hub of our ranches.

“And the grandkids don’t call it the west ranch. They call it Mammy’s place.”

Kathy’s yard was her pride and joy, Crystal said.

“The place was pristine. It was her happy place. The lawn was beautiful, everything was green. When they bought that place, there wasn’t anything but a cookhouse and a horse barn. Everything else, Tim and Kathy have built from the ground up with blood, sweat and tears. That was tough to see all their hard work strung out in piles.”

The kitchen was where the family gathered, Crystal said.

“You could walk into Mammy’s kitchen, and it was the heart of the home. She always had something to eat. She had all the good toys, the fun stuff, the good food. I don’t think the grandkids quite grasp it yet. Mammy’s is no longer, and that’s going to be tough.” 

Runkle, the hired man, and his girlfriend Falon Hatch were at the ranch when the tornado hit. They took shelter in the basement in Tim and Kathy’s house with the dogs, under a comforter.

The wedge tornado nearly completely derailed a BNSF train. Cleanup operations were underway immediately, with one track reopened by midmorning on April 28.

The National Weather Service in North Platte reported the initial touchdown for the tornado was at about 5:41 pm MT and on the ground for the next hour and a half, traveling from south of Bingham, Neb. to north of Ashby.

“It was on the ground the whole time,” said Nathan Jurgensen, senior meteorologist at the North Platte office. “It showed a continuous path of about twenty miles.”

The tornado was the largest in the North Platte local forecast area, Jurgensen said, since tornado records began in the 1950s. In width, it was about 2200 yards, or about 1 ¼ miles wide.

Wedge tornados are loosely defined, according to the NWS glossary, as “slang for a large tornado with a condensation funnel that is at least as wide horizontally at the ground as it is vertically, from ground to base.” In other words, Jurgensen said, “a true wedge tornado has a funnel at least as wide at the ground as it is tall.”

Wedge tornadoes are very rare in western climates because they need a “rich humid air mass at the surface that allows for a tornado to achieve such a large size,” he said.

“As you get farther west, you get into a more arid climate. Moisture-starved thunderstorms have higher bases and not enough moisture at the lower levels to grow to that size.”

The humidity was high that day, Jurgensen said, with the dewpoint at the Ogallala reporting station in the low 60s.

The cyclic super cell that produced this wedge tornado stretched from Bingham to Valentine and spawned other tornadoes, including one reported at Merritt Reservoir southwest of Valentine at 11 pm CT.

At the Cover Ranch, people poured in to help immediately. Between fifty and one hundred people were at the ranch on Monday, and help continued throughout the week.

They brought rakes, chainsaws, skid steers, and anything else needed to clean up. Women raked the yard of debris; men sawed downed trees and moved them. They went through belongings, finding salvageable items.

“I would say, there’s been a month’s worth of work done in two days,” Chris said. “It’s unreal. I would venture to say there were over 100 trees on the place, and there are three left standing. Every one is cut down, in a pile, and out of the way.

“A crew of guys built a four-wire fence in four hours, a mile of it. Another crew is pulling out a mile of fence in the tree belt, has it rolled up, and is digging post holes. Community businesses are offering anything and everything. People have sent bundles of posts and wires and material. We had a flatbed trailer load of hedge posts and continuous panels dropped off today. We want for nothing and are forever in debt.”

It’s been emotional for Tim and Kathy’s sons, including Chris (he and Crystal have two children, Hunter and Brecken), Matt (married to Sara, with children John, Kennedy and Graham, born three days after the tornado hit), and Jeff (married to Carolyn, with children Kirby, Claire and Audrey.)

Even the grandkids helped, sorting through things, nailing tin on roofs, raking, and doing anything they could.

Volunteers “come in all sizes and ages,” Crystal said. “My five-year-old niece was carrying toys out of the toy room. The older gentlemen were sitting in payloaders and skid loaders all day. A lot of the women, their priority was getting Kathy’s backyard in order. They spent hours on the end of a rake and a wheelbarrow.

“Men built fence, women picked up branches, and others dug tin out of miles of tree rows,” she said. Volunteers “performed very tedious work as they brought the shop down, piece by piece, so as to not hurt anyone and keep the equipment inside undamaged.

“People out here, they know. They show up and go to work. That’s a huge relief, to not have to worry about it. They show up and get the job done.”

Tim and Kathy are living in the cookhouse till a new house can be built.

Chris and Crystal had just produced a high school rodeo in Hyannis the weekend prior, and, as usual, family, friends and the community volunteered with it.

And they all turned around and helped out again when the tornado hit.

“We’re doing really good,” Chris said. “It’s hard to feel sorry for yourself when you see what the community and family and friends have done for us.

“It’s not about the tornado,” Chris said. “It’s about the community and our family.”