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In fact, i would have had it around tornado but there was too much hail and debris in the air. as soon as i saw the tornado touch down you could tell it was not a good situation with all the debris flying around it. chad, when you look at this ridio, it s shocking to see people who have survived obviously picking through all of their stuff. chad, what were you seeing today as you were watching these storms? i was seeing that immediate development that brian was just talking about and seeing all of the people that were in mobile homes that honestly didn t have time to go find a stronger structure. that s what we say. find a stronger structure. a 100-mile-per-hour wind gust can knock over a mobile home. get out of the mobile home. go someplace stronger. many of them didn t have that kind of time. yeah. brian, we re also looking at what looks like downtown. were you able to survey that? yes. unfortunately, you know, it took ....
Mean. we can see people standing in the middle of the road just looking at what we assume were their homes. and you say there wasn t any warning. what do you mean? how quickly did this come up on them? well, the problem was just the storm in general. the weather service does a great job of tornado warnings but the problem was this time the storm developed very rapidly and from the really five minutes before it tornadoed i would not have actually believed if you told me it was going to tornado. the storm produced a wall cloud very quickly, and that wall cloud tightened up very rapidly. and then it just it went to the ground very, very quickly. so there wasn t a lot of times with a strong tornado there s a lot of leeway, a lot of time for people to prepare. but this time just because of how quick the tornado developed i m not sure that there was a tremendous length of time for people to prepare. we re looking at the fire you were talking about right now in someone s home. brian ....
Weren t warned right away either. i did send a video over to the national weather service to get them warned as soon as i saw them. it was the same way that i saw it move toward periwhy-ton. i often send it to the national weather service to get it warned as well. okay, nick, stand by if you would because we just got the fire chief of perryton, paul dutcher. we want to bring him in right now. chief, thank you very much. i know it s a busy time for you and i hear the fire department took a direct hit from the tornado. tell us what it s like there. well, yeah, there s damage all across the north and east part of perryton and the center part of the destruction is two-block area of our downtown area. and that s where our fire department s located. we took a direct hit. many of our trucks are pretty badly damaged, but you know, ....
A direct hit and while not every part of the downtown is destroyed it is heavily damaged. basically all the windows are blown out. parts of the roof. parts of the buildings. so once you know, i had found all of the residential and i was actually by the industrial area watching the tornado there. when i saw the downtown i was just like this is just not a good thing. i mean, basically the heart of the town, just the tornado went right through it. it really honestly just made me really sad because i was like there s no part of this town that was really okay. brian, are you from here? no. i am from arkansas. and so you knew that there was a tornado outbreak? texas? why did you happen to be positioned here at this hour? yeah, that s what i do. i have basically two full-time jobs. one is storm chasing and one is ....
Fire department for 33 years and this is the first tornado that s done any type of major damage to the city. we ve had some small f-0s touch down and maybe skirt the city or do a little bit of damage. but absolutely nothing to this magnitude in the last 33-plus years. do you have any sense of how many homes have been destroyed? no. i m going to guess probably 200. well, chief, we know that you re busy. we really appreciate you giving us a status report. thank you very much. and obviously we will check back in with the people of perryton throughout the night. thank you for being here. all right. thank you. bye. okay. we ll be right back. that smell could be 8,000,000 odor causing bacteria. ....