AccuWeather's Tony Laubach reported live from Colorado on the evening of July 20 as severe storms struck communities with intense hail.
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00:00 severe weather threat continues to take shape in the plains and Midwest as well.
00:04 And that's where we find Tony Laubach. He's near Los Animas, Colorado with more. Tony.
00:09 Yeah, Kevin, this is a pretty volatile storm here. We've been tracking this storm. This was
00:18 the spring storm, the Colorado spring storm that produced the large hail and some of the flooding.
00:23 We've been following this storm for several hours now. And this is what you're looking at here as
00:27 it approaches the town of Los Animas. This this will be between Pueblo and Lamar, Colorado on
00:33 US Highway 50. So in southeast Colorado, very dangerous storm. This storm has really intensified,
00:39 especially in the last, I'd say 20 minutes or so after it kind of merged with some storms that
00:44 were coming up out of the south. This thing is really kind of started to get some rotation back
00:47 to it here, maybe trying to generate a little bit of tornadic potential just off to the north
00:53 and east of Los Animas right now. We'll show you earlier with the storm look like before the merger.
00:58 Like I said, very impressive looking storms. These are typical high plain storms that you see,
01:03 and they certainly look pretty ominous. This storm had up to baseball sized hail reported with it
01:09 again, not only near Colorado Springs, but further out east also had a lot of smaller hail got into
01:16 some portions of that storm that actually dumped hail several inches deep in some places. So
01:21 hazardous travel with that as well. But again, this storm, a very, very strong, very, very
01:25 significant storm. We're going to bring you back live here again. This is looking west toward the
01:30 town of Los Animas. I'm about three miles to the east of Los Animas. Looking to the west, you can
01:36 just see again this whole thing taking up the sky. What you're looking at is the forward flank. This
01:40 is actually the shelf cloud that you're seeing right now in that area, that white area of lowering
01:47 not is the shelf cloud anywhere where we're looking for tornac activity with this storm.
01:52 Kevin, unfortunately, is going to be buried deep within the rain. So folks in Los Animas to Lamar
01:57 certainly want to keep your heads up for this storm as it continues to work its way east.
02:00 Great information there, Tony. Thanks for chasing those storms for us and as always stay safe.
02:06 It's going to be a long night out there from the Texas Panhandle northward. Now we do want to show
02:11 you give you a quick update on a couple of tornado warnings. They're both Doppler indicated. One of
02:15 them is south of Erie, Pennsylvania, which is also dealing with flash flooding. And we also are
02:21 dealing with a tornado warning here on just north of Columbus, Ohio, folks. There's the one right
02:27 there and then the other one right there. So both of these again are moving east at 25 miles an hour.
02:32 They are associated with large hail and damaging winds, but there's enough rotation on the radar
02:38 here to prompt the Weather Service to issue the tornado warnings, which at this point have not
02:43 been confirmed. But if you do live in the area of Columbus, Ohio and between Pittsburgh and Erie, PA,
02:48 use extra caution here moving forward. Boy, we've got heavy weather along
02:52 I-80, I-70. It's not a good night for travel out there.