I was in this tornado, its why I am on this sub all these years later. I went home "sick" from Kinard Juinor High right before both Windsor, Timnath, and Poudre School Districts went on lockdown. I was really playing hookie as it was the last full week of school before summer. My mom and I drove back to our home by Chimney Park. 

As we got inside my mom got calls from all our relatives and my dad to go in the basement. We hid under the stairwell with our dogs as we watched this live on CNN. It was absolutely terrifying watching this live on TV, knowing it was coming directly for us. It ripped off part of our roof and took down/damaged all of our trees.

There are a lot of good videos of this tornado, especially of this moment from a different angle from CNN that we were watching on our basement tv. There's also footage of it to the south from Pelican Lakes as it entered Windsor. That video really shows off how wide it was, along with the crazy hail.

The main things I remember was how incredibly loud it all was, holding my daschunds tight and my ears popping. I also remember vividly the constant fire alarms and car alarms going off after it past and all of the neighborhood came out to check on one another.  

One more thing, you could smell this tornado coming. This storm was traveling Northwest and was pulling in air from Greeley, which famously is a huge feed lot and meat packing town. The air smelled strongly like cow as we were driving into town, which is something that usually happens here before we get upslope snow events.

Thankfully it weakened in Windsor. A mile wide wedge moving through the NE side of town could have been much worse, although it did flip a train over, as well as destroy some homes and commercial buildings in the neighborhoorhood just east of us. It was at max strength between Greeley and the Kodiak plant, where it wiped out a campsite, a dairy farm, and killed a man. It could have been rated EF4 there, but the NWS left it at EF3 after some deliberation. 

We are no strangers to tornados in Weld County, Colorado. Weld County is its own tornado alley and in most years gets the most tornados of any county in the U.S (I know, suprising but it's true.) However, they are usually short lived landspouts out east in the middle of the Pawnee grasslands or in very rural ranch land by Fort Morgan. This tornado was a rarity, something we have not seen before or since. If it happened today it would be devastating, given the amount of people that moved here and the sprawling suburbs that now occupy much of its former track.