Feisty spring weather continued to be a fright-monger for some and a source of fascination for others as tornadoes hit at least three areas of northeast Kansas.

Joy Moser, public information officer for the Adjutant General’s Office, said Jefferson and Leavenworth counties were the hardest hit. A tornado was reported on the ground about 6:55 p.m. near Perry Lake, where it overturned boats in the marina and tore the roof off an outbuilding near Winchester, Moser said.

A small tornado also went through the Lansing area, Moser said, causing damage to trees and a K-Mart store.

An emergency management worker about 6:30 p.m. reported a tornado on the ground two miles northwest of McLouth, according to the National Weather Service in Topeka.

Missie von Hallberg, 24, who just moved to Kansas from North Hollywood, Calif., got her first taste of the drama that is Kansas climate when she heard tornado sirens Wednesday evening from her living quarters above Helen’s Hilltop tavern two miles west of Tonganoxie.

“I was panicked before the sirens went off,” she said. “The sirens just confirmed it for me.”

Von Hallberg sat at the bar with a drink to calm her nerves. Her dog, Diva, perched on the footriser beneath her owner’s barstool. The dog looked nervous even by Chihuahua standards.

	Lightning is the second deadliest weather-related killer in the United States, averaging 73 deaths per year. Hundreds more are injured, many with serious and lasting effects. The National Weather Service offers these tips for avoiding a lightning strike:Keep an eye on the sky. Look for darkening skies, flashes of lightning or increasing wind, which may be signs of an approaching thunderstorm.Don’t wait for rain to postpone outdoor activities: Many people take shelter from the rain, but most people struck by lightning are not in the rain. Lightning can strike as far as 10 miles from a storm. Go quickly inside a completely enclosed building, not a carport, open garage or covered patio.Places to avoid: under or close to trees, sheds, picnic shelters, baseball dugouts, bleachers, open fields. If there is no shelter, crouch in the open, keeping twice as far away from a tree as it is tall.Get out of the water; it’s a conductor of electricity. If caught in a boat, crouch down in the center away from metal hardware. Lightning can strike the water and travel some distance beneath and away from its point of contact. Don’t stand in puddles of water.

“She has a cat and a dog,” bartender Amy Abramovitz said of von Hallberg. “She came running down with them on her shoulders.”

But the excitement at the tavern and surrounding towns in Jefferson and Leavenworth counties passed almost as quickly as the east-moving storm.

The storm dumped yet more rain on northeast Kansas.

By 10 p.m. Wednesday, Lawrence had soaked up another 0.45 inches of precipitation, according to Bill Newman of the National Weather Service in Topeka. Weather spotter Danny Basel said an inch of rain had fallen overnight Tuesday in Eudora, but he didn’t have a reading for Wednesday evening rainfall.

Storms create light show

It wasn’t funneled wind but lightning that offered the best weather show the last three nights in Lawrence and surrounding towns.

“The other night, I thought lightning was going to come right in the house with me,” Curtis Hall said.

Hall, a Kansas University lecturer in physics and astronomy, said the amount of lightning was a direct indicator of a thunderstorm’s strength.

As others were perhaps heading for shelter Tuesday night, Lawrence photographer Kyle Gerstner grabbed his gear and headed to KU for the fourth or fifth time in the past few weeks.

His quest: to capture a lightning strike over campus.

“I’ve been trying for a long time,” he said. “I finally got the shot.”

From the parking garage adjacent to the Kansas Union, Gerstner took the photo you see on page 1A with his Canon D-60 digital camera, with a four-second shutter speed and aperture of f5.6. It was about 10 p.m.

“I went up the night before and didn’t have much luck,” he said. “There was too much rain that night.”

Though it appears to be striking the Campanile, the lightning in the photo apparently struck a radio tower on campus, Gerstner said.

Lawrence and the surrounding area should get a rain reprieve at least for today. The forecast calls for sunny skies with highs in the upper 60s turning to partly cloudy this evening with lows in the lower 40s.

But look for a soggy weekend. The chance for showers and thunderstorms is better than 50 percent on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.