Drone video captures the moment a tornado touched down in Kansas

Days after a powerful tornado tore through Andover, Kansas, residents have begun to pick up the pieces, and startling new imagery of the twister in all its fury has emerged. More than 1,000 buildings were destroyed in the Wichita suburb, but just four people were injured by the weather disaster, according to officials.

The National Weather Service (NWS) said the tornado, which was on the ground for 21 minutes, carved a 13-mile-long path of destruction and was rated an EF3 with maximum wind speeds of 155 mph.

According to The Associated Press, four people, including two firefighters who were responding to a call in Andover, were injured during the storm. Their injuries were minor. There were no reported fatalities.

Chad Russell, the Andover fire chief, said that out of the 1,074 buildings that were damaged by the storm, 300 to 400 of them were destroyed. Russell said that it will take years for the city to recover from this storm.

"The city of Andover will be affected by this for years," he said in a press conference on Saturday afternoon. "We will have scars from the 1991 (F5 tornado). I'm so thankful this tornado was not as bad as that, but we will literally be doing this for years."

On Sunday, electricity was restored to the nearly 15,000 customers who lost power during the storm, and by Monday morning, just over 600 customers still lacked power, according to PowerOutage.US.

The Dr. Jim Farha YMCA center in Andover sustained a direct hit from the tornado that caused significant damage. Mike Scantlin, a storm chaser, spoke with two young men who were at the YMCA when the tornado struck.

Zac and Dylan Damron. (Credit: Mike Scantlin)

"I was working out and I rushed out to the window on the south side and seeing the tornado right there at the end of this park or about at the end of this school right behind here, and I told me and my friend, let's rush to the locker rooms and get safe," Dylan Damron said. "Nobody was freaking out, you know the tornado only lasted about 10 seconds, if that, and then as soon as it passed, we opened the locker room door and got out of there just in case the roof came in or something happened so nobody was hurt."

The brothers say they are just fortunate to be alive and not injured.

"Me and my brother were walking down the hallway to go out and about 2 feet in front of us, a big old metal ceiling pannel or something fell from the ceiling and almost hit [Zac]," Dylan said. "[We] could have been seriously injured, but we were all fine."

When they got out of the building, multiple cars were piled up against it. Zac's car was on top of another car, while Dylan's car was upside down in the parking lot.

A photographer with the Wichita Eagle publication shared photos of the cars pushed up against one of the YMCA's entrances.

Alyssa Kaylor, a YMCA employee, her husband, 6-month-old son, Bodie, and her dogs found shelter in their basement as the violent tornado ripped through their neighborhood. While it didn't appear that the house took the brunt of the damage, the structural safety team said the home needed to be leveled and rebuilt, according to a GoFundMe page set up by her friend, Ginny Huddleston.

"To make matters worse, that YMCA mentioned above...the one destroyed. That's Ally's job (and how we met). She loved that job and thrived there. She's impacted so many people's lives for the better," Huddleston wrote on the crowdsourcing website. "The coming months are going to be hard, so anything donated will help."

Another resident of Andover, Mike Wilson, suffered damage to his home when the twister struck on Friday.

"I looked through our windows and saw the formation of the tornado and the debris spinning around," Wilson said to KWCH, a local television station. "That is when I got my family and my pets into our concrete room. That saved us."

This is not the first tornado Wilson has encountered. More than 30 years ago, in 1991, Wilson was in Augusta, Kansas, just east of Andover, when the deadly F5 tornado struck his hometown. According to the NWS, the historic F5 Andover tornado occurred on April 26, 1991, and tracked 46 miles, sweeping multiple homes off their foundations and killing at least 13 people.

Wilson rushed home to find his family. He said the extensive amount of rubble made it difficult for his parents to escape from their house.

"I found scrap wood between the neighbors and built me a makeshift ladder that would get down 6 feet into the well so they could climb out," Wilson said. "Horrifying. It's loud. It's destructive. I always think of tornadoes in one word, called uprooting. It uproots trees, and it uproots families."

In addition to the storm damage, three University of Oklahoma meteorology students were killed in a car crash about 85 miles north of Oklahoma City in Oklahoma on Friday as they returned from storm chasing in Kansas, according to the Oklahoma State Patrol.

The storms Friday night also produced numerous reports of severe weather in other parts of Kansas, Nebraska and Missouri. These storms delivered grapefruit-sized hail, damaging wind gusts and tornadoes to parts of the southern Plains.

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On Saturday, the severe weather continued across parts of the Midwest. At least two twisters touched down briefly on Saturday in northeastern Illinois.

Just west of Chicago, in Oak Brook, a tornado touched down while nearly 700 students from the St. Charles East School were arriving at a hotel for their high school prom, just before 5 p.m. local time. according to ABC7 Chicago.

The twister traveled about 1.9 miles with maximum wind speeds of 75 miles per hour, according to the NWS, which classified the tornado as an EF0. Damage along the path included snapped tree branches, a few uprooted trees and a partial roof loss to an outbuilding. The twister was on the ground for three minutes, and no one was injured.

"[The students] were arriving when this started to happen, and thank goodness that they stayed in their cars and nobody was injured," Westmont Fire Department Chief, Steve Riley, told ABC7 Chicago.

Nearly an hour later, another brief tornado touched down in Candlewick Lake, which is northwest of Chicago. The NWS storm survey said this twister traveled half a mile as an EF0 with maximum wind speeds of 80 miles per hour.

More severe weather is expected to impact the storm-weary region this week as storms emerging from the West will bring the threat of downpours, hail, gusty winds and tornadoes to the Plains. AccuWeather meteorologists say residents in this part of the country should stay alert for severe weather throughout the week.

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