KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — The Kansas City Chiefs nearly had to make one of their draft picks Thursday night while seeking shelter from a tornado.
Sirens sounded amid a tornado warning just before the Chiefs went on the clock with the second of their two first-round selections, forcing the front-office staff to huddle in their draft room. Reporters and other staff who were in the training complex retreated to an inner hallway away from windows, where a wall-mounted TV was showing the draft as it happened.
“The draft room is in the middle of the building,” Chiefs coach Andy Reid said. “It’s actually one of the shelter spots.”
Chiefs general manager Brett Veach doesn’t usually spend the entire night in the draft room, though. He prefers to bounce between the hectic room full of coaches and scouts and his office, where he can watch the draft unfold in peace and quiet.
Veach wound up having to join everyone else in the draft room when Brian Shafar, the senior director of team security, told him that tornado sirens were blaring, and that a line of heavy thunderstorms was moving over the training facility.
“I don’t like staying in the draft room. I like going into my office,” Veach said. “He came in and said there’s a tornado warning, and we all have to go into the draft room. I was like, ‘There ain’t anything blowing this building down. This building is like concrete.
“It was a little different,” Veach said, “but we followed all the safety protocols for sure.”
The tornado siren ended about 15 minutes before the Chiefs went on the clock with the 29th overall pick. They used it on Clemson defensive tackle Peter Woods, adding him to LSU cornerback Mansoor Delane, whom they chose with the sixth overall pick.
Both of them will soon become quite familiar with spring storms that pass through Tornado Alley.
