Is Vici, Oklahoma A Tornado Supercell Magnet?

The severe weather season has already started across Oklahoma this year, and if you were watching the coverage during last Thursday’s tornado outbreak in Western Oklahoma, you probably heard a familiar little town mentioned again.

Vici.

Pronounced Vye-Sigh

For longtime Oklahoma weather watchers, that name pops up a lot. Especially if you grew up during the Gary England era of storm coverage.

Vici sits out in the middle of Northwest Oklahoma, surrounded by wheat fields and long stretches of two-lane highway, but it somehow manages to show up in storm coverage more often than Moore.

Now to be clear, Vici doesn’t actually get more tornadoes than anywhere else. It just seems to be one of the most common places big storms fire up when they start rolling across Western and Northwest Oklahoma.

Oklahoma's Old Faithful

During last Thursday's tornado outbreak, the first radar returns started popping up in that same general area again. It was another one of those moments where if you’ve watched enough Oklahoma weather coverage, the name jumped out at you as soon as David Payne said it.

If you grew up hearing the legendary Gary England track storms, Vici was his old stomping grounds, so he made a point to mention it in his coverage.

I can’t even count how many times he said something like, “Get Val on the Getner, he’s out near Vici,” before tossing it out to Oklahoma's favorite storm tracker out in the wild, becoming the original "Tornado Wrangler."

Over time the name just sticks in your brain.

For a place with a population barely pushing a couple hundred people, that’s a pretty unique claim to fame.

The funny thing is, Vici itself doesn’t really see any more severe weather than the rest of Oklahoma. It just happens to sit in a spot where storms often start organizing as they move out across the plains.

So when meteorologists start pointing at developing storms in that part of the state, Vici ends up being so easy to pinpoint because we've had sixty years of meteorologists pointing at it.

Small on the map, but somehow always showing up when Oklahoma weather starts getting interesting.