As Justin Gibbs watched the radar on the evening of Wednesday, April 2, he saw a tornado heading a bit too close to home—not once, but twice. 

Gibbs, lead forecaster at the National Weather Service office in Paducah, and his team had already issued dozens of warnings that night as a storm system raced across the region. The first close call came early that evening when a tornado touched down about three-quarters of a mile from their West Paducah office. The second call came around 9:30 that night. 

Gibbs, a Calloway County High School graduate, attended Murray State for three years as a broadcast journalism student before he transferred to the University of South Alabama to pursue meteorology. 

 “It was a scary moment, because most of my family still lives in Murray… ,” Gibbs said. “It’s pretty much a nightmare for me watching a tornado debris signature tracking directly to Murray, having grown up there.”

The Murray storm was later rated as an EF2, with winds from 115 to 135 miles per hour. This category of tornado is enough to move the foundation of homes, rip off roofing and even uproot entire trees and knock them down, possibly onto power lines.

There was also considerable damage in McCracken County, where Christ Community Church was destroyed. All services had been cancelled for the day, which meant everyone was out of the building when the storm came through around the time that members would have been getting out of church. There was other damage from the high wind speeds, and Gibbs can see it on his daily drive to work.

“We can see that church from our office. It only missed us by about three-quarters of a mile,” Gibbs said. “We had to take alternate routes to work, and one of my teammates had their house hit by the tornado, and had some, thankfully, minor damage.”

Gibbs and his team are in charge of a significant  portion of western Kentucky, and they were required to make sure that all of their counties knew what was happening  and what they needed to be doing. They reported seven confirmed tornadoes on the ground that night. 

“In my office, we serve 58 counties in four different states,” Gibbs said. “Last we counted, we had 19 tornadoes in our area of responsibility that we’re aware of… The challenge was that we have 2 million people in our area and we have to make sure that they understand what’s going to happen both a day or two ahead and during the event.”

Gibbs and his team often work long hours, especially during severe weather. 

“It took every one of us that work here over the course of the day,” Gibbs said. “I think I put in a 16-hour day two or three days in a row. I had 73 or 74 hours on my time card by the end of the week… I think I got to work Wednesday at 10 a.m. and I left about 2:30 or 3 in the morning, maybe even a little later.”

High chances of flash flooding accompanied the threat of tornadoes that night and throughout the weekend. Gibbs had to be certain that people knew how to be prepared for things that wouldn’t be happening for a few days, and he said that was not an easy thing to do.

“My role was working as an overall coordinator for the event, and for the other part I was the warning forecaster issuing the tornado warnings, the severe thunderstorm warnings and the flash flood warnings,” Gibbs said. “We switch roles as necessary to limit fatigue, and sometimes we’re doing multiple roles.”

Even though Gibbs has family in the area, he can’t let that change what he needs to do when there is severe weather.

“I treat everybody in my area with the same degree of concern that I would my family… We let our process work for them too,” Gibbs said. “A lot of times in this business, you can’t think about what has happened, you just have to focus on the people that are in the path going forward… We’re going to miss things from time to time, but we can’t miss it because of our attention or not giving it everything that we got.”