Early-morning storm walloped this corner of Johnson County. ‘I was shaking’

A thunder and lightning storm that rattled much of the Kansas City area Sunday night and into Monday morning was even more severe for a corner of Johnson County — literally.

The corner was at West 207th Street and South Ridgeview Road in Spring Hill, Kansas, where trees were shorn, twisted and uprooted. The worst of the storm, roiling all night, struck between 4:30 a.m. and 5 a.m. Monday.

The National Weather Service did not list the event as a tornado, although it triggered alarms.

“My weather radio went off. It said there was a tornado warning between 199th and 215th Streets,” said Marla Burvee, who has occupied a ranch home on West 207th Street for 41 years. From bed, she switched on the television to see what was happening.

“I no sooner got the TV on, and the power went out,” Burvee said.

“People say they hear trains and such. I don’t know if I would describe it as a train, but it was loud. It was a sound I never, ever heard before.”

Overnight thunderstorms dumped as much as 2 to 5 inches of rain across parts of the region, with several inches falling around the metro, flooding roads and low-lying spots, according to rainfall totals collected by the Iowa Environmental Mesonet.

The National Weather Service has issued a flood warning for parts of Johnson, Wyandotte, Clay, Jackson and Platte counties in the metro, where local law enforcement reported flooding in the area.

Storm hits Spring Hill

She rose from bed and looked out her window to the east.

“I saw a dark - won’t even say it was the shape of a funnel cloud — but it was up above the trees. And then everything went pure white, like somebody put a white sheet over my window. I thought,’I must be in the middle of this thing. . . .This is it.”

The roar was terrifying. Burvee, a bookkeeper for 45 years at Olathe’s Wolf Creek Golf Club, grabbed her dog and huddled in the hallway.

“I can’t get her to go in the basement,” she said.

Hail pummeled the house as if it were being struck by golf balls.

As for her home: “I couldn’t tell you if it was shaking because I was shaking,” Burvee said Monday morning.

Daylight rose. Burvee said she peered outside. A stand of 50-foot-tall trees, just to the west of her home, had been split, twisted, or felled. Large branches were ripped away and strewn across her yard.

Feeling blessed to be standing

A power line fell, draped over a recreational vehicle at the rear of Burvee’s driveway. The top of her chimney was ripped from the house. In her front yard, two blue spruce trees that Burvee had planted 41 years ago were uprooted and lay on their sides.

By mid-morning, Burvee, realizing that few others around seemed to be equally affected, was taking it all in good humor.

“I probably brought it on myself,” she joked. “We’ve had so many storms come through, I thought ’Oh, I’ve got a hill over there (to the east) and a hill over there (to the west). I’m good. I’m down here in this little valley.”

She was grateful the damage wasn’t worse.

“I feel lucky. I feel blessed. I’ve got my house and I’ve got my dog. I feel blessed that I’m still standing,” Burvee said. “I haven’t cried yet. I figure that will be coming.”

Normally watches storms from the porch. Not this time.

Directly across the street, Stephen and Kelly Anne Herl’s property was also struck. The house was intact. Trees along the property were mangled. Large limbs torn off. Trunks were cleaved down the center.

Stephen Herl said he was already awake and getting up between 4:30 a.m. and 5 a.m. when he heard the tornado sirens. He said he was headed to the living room to check the television when the wind began to roar.

“Boy, the wind, it started rattling the house. I said, ‘We’re going to the basement right now. We’ll figure out the rest later.’”

Herl said that although he had cellphones, Google and Alexa, none had alerted him. Because of that, he said that by Monday morning he had already ordered a weather radio.

He had also already driven around to see that his property and his neighbor’s seemed to be the only ones strongly affected. A new housing development being built just next door had no apparent damage, all of which made Herl wonder whether they were hit by a sudden microburst.

“This seems to be the epicenter of it,” he said. “I’m thinking maybe a funnel tried to come down and didn’t hit the ground. Maybe it came down and went back up real quick and took out just this corner.”

Like Burvee, Herl feels lucky.

“Considering the circumstances,” he said. “We could have slept through the whole thing and it could have come down on top of us.

“We were actually down in the basement pretty damn quick. Scared me. I’ve been a Kansas boy for 75 years now. And normally we stay out here on the porch and watch that stuff. . . .I heard the sirens and that happened about 5 minutes later.”

The Star’s Robert A. Cronkleton contributed.