A few months later, she moved to Washington, DC, on a congressional fellowship and went to work for a senator who sat on the committee that oversaw the Commerce Department. “I’m gunning for something inside NOAA,” she said. “You have to have people on the inside to make the change.” In late 2014 her ambition collided with Kathy Sullivan’s, and NOAA hired Kim Klockow to be its first, and only, social scientist. She became the odd group in the room.
She’d spent three years in the job. She’d hoped to create a social science unit on the top of the agency that could both direct a research program and spread what it learned through the Weather Service. “The problem with our science is that it is new,” she said. “And we don’t know how to make people not die. We need data on what led a person to do what they did. We need observations of humans responding to weather information.” She’d made some progress. She’d also been frustrated. “Barry Myers [AccuWeather’s CEO] turned up at a meeting and said that I shouldn’t be doing what I was doing,” she said. “Because it’s marketing. But it’s not marketing. It’s saving lives. The question became: What can we do in this space without interfering with the profits of AccuWeather?”
And then Trump was elected. She’d planned to return to Oklahoma anyway, but now she did it with a sense that she might be better off starting small, rather than trying to change the entire Weather Service from the top. “The inspiration came from Dr. Sullivan—she advised me to rely on‘small bets’ to make significant organizational change, not to try to force big, sudden change from the top.”
It was May 2017, and Kim Klockow had been back in an office at the University of Oklahoma only a few weeks when the meteorologists in the Storm Prediction Center forecast a storm in the Texas Panhandle. She hopped into a car with another meteorologist and went west, to where the weather came from. “When I was in DC I lost my sense of direction,” she said. “In DC this is not material knowledge.” She’d found the storm in Texas, and then turned around and followed it from behind into Oklahoma. The little girl once terrified by the storm that was chasing her was now a woman chasing a storm. In Oklahoma, as often happened, the storm met an atmosphere more favorable to it, and it grew. “I saw it,” she said. “It was a beast.” She’d arrived just outside of Elk City when she heard the Weather Service issue its tornado warning—and so she’d stopped. “You don’t chase into a city,” she said. “You don’t chase to see death and destruction.”
At length, she and I drive the hot, flat road past the Cherokee Trading Post & Boot Outlet and arrive in Elk City. Elk City is where we’d been heading all along.
Lonnie Risenhoover had been managing emergencies in Beckham County in one way or another for forty years. Before he became emergency manager for the entire county, he’d worked as a fireman in Elk City, where he was born and raised. His great-grandfather had moved there in the late nineteenth century, before Oklahoma was even a state, and the family had remained ever since. There were only about twenty-five thousand people in the whole of Beckham County, about half of those in Elk City, and Lonnie knew most of them. He’d seen all the storms, too, but the county had been lucky that way. “Most of the tornadoes are real rural,” he said. “‘Well, we had a tornado and Joe’s chicken coop just blowed away.’” Tornayda. The one thing the storms had in common was the hysteria about them generated by the TV news stations in Oklahoma City. “If there’s an icicle hanging off the corner of the house it’s ‘hey, there’s an icicle hangin’ off the corner of the house, we’re gonna go live with it!’” A-sicle.
The information Lonnie took seriously came directly from the National Weather Service. (“If the Weather Service had a TV channel, everyone would just watch that.”) Every morning he woke up and checked NWSChat—the Weather Service’s tool for communicating with local emergency managers. The morning of May 16, 2017, had a slightly different feel to it than usual, though Lonnie didn’t immediately put his finger on why. They said a storm was coming from the Panhandle, but storms were always coming from the Panhandle. There was no tornado warning.
But a tornado wasn’t like a winter storm. The models hadn’t gotten to the point where they could predict a tornado before it happened, in the way they could bigger weather systems. The Weather Service could only issue a tornado warning after it had seen the tornado, either with its radar or one of its spotters. “What I noticed,” said Lonnie, “was that they’d changed some of the language they used. They said‘tornado emergency.’ It used to be just a” tornado warning.’”
He left the chat more worried than usual. The storm might be a problem, he thought.
The Elk City Fire Department had a few tornado spotters, but they just sat at fixed points: the city had blind spots. “The western part of Beckham County, we didn’t have many storm spotters,” Lonnie said. “And I’m basically a one-man shop. So I can do everything I need to do in my vehicle.” His truck had so much gear in it that you didn’t want to ask what it all was, for fear that the explanations would never end. From his truck he could measure the wind speed, see the radar, and stay in touch with the Weather Service, even if his phone lost service. He got into his truck and drove west, to find a place from which he could see as much of the earth’s surface as possible.
If you were just passing through you’d think Beckham County was essentially flat. Brownish-yellow wheat fields and pastureland as far as the eye can see. In his forty years of storm spotting, Lonnie had come to know every slight undulation in the terrain. In twenty minutes he was parked on some of the highest ground in the county, facing southwest. When the meteorologists from the Storm Prediction Center go out to chase storms, they chase them from behind, to make sure they aren’t overtaken by the tornado. Lonnie just sat there, waiting for the tornado to come at him. “My wife used to go with me,” he said. “Now she won’t. She says,‘You scare me.’”
Then he saw it. Or maybe he didn’t. “I seen a funnel,” he said. “But I wasn’t going to start calling it a tornado until I start seeing grass or something else it’s picking up.” Whatever he was seeing vanished after maybe a minute. He couldn’t tell how fast it might be moving toward him, or how far away it was. He didn’t want to trigger a warning unnecessarily—if he did that, people might not believe the next one. At the same time, what he was hearing just then from the National Weather Service was not normal. They hadn’t seen the tornado, but they were acting almost as if they had. “I kept getting information,” he said. “They were feeding me a lot of information. And I thought, This is really, really going to be bad.”
He was utterly exposed. Alone, out in a massive storm that might, or might not, be concealing a tornado. He wheeled his truck around and hauled ass. Instead of heading straight back toward Elk City, he drove south, along the width of the storm. As he drove, he reported what he was seeing to the Weather Service, and the Weather Service was reporting what it knew to him. The anemometer on top of his truck recorded the speed of the winds being sucked into the storm: 79 miles per hour. The Weather Service told him they’d had reports of hail that was bigger than baseballs. Traveling 80 miles an hour down a dirt road in a pelting rain, he was all the time thinking about what to do: Wait, to make sure he’d seen what he’d seen? Or phone the Weather Service and trigger a tornado warning that set off the town siren? “So you sit here and make this decision,” he said. “And I think: Who is going to dispute my word? So I called the Weather Service.”
He came upon a sight that pulled him up short: downed power lines. The poles that had held them were gone. As if they had never been there. The tornado had crossed his path and leaped ahead of him: how he did not know. He’d thought the storm was chasing him; now, apparently, he was chasing the storm. Then he saw it, but it took him a moment to realize what he was seeing. It wasn’t like a tornado in the movies. “It looks like the cloud was on the ground,” he said. “It was a thousand yards wide.”
For the next twenty minutes he followed the cloud’s trail of destruction. Dead cows everywhere. Shattered oak tr
ees. A school bus turned into a twisted pile of metal. Cars piled on top of each other, upside down, in a pond. He knew the landscape well enough to see what it was missing: big trees, telephone poles, mobile homes. “You could say,” There used to be a house there,’” he said. One house he passed was only partially destroyed. It looked as if some giant had tried to dissect it: the front half had been ripped away so that he could see all the way back into the television room. The big red barn that had been right next to it had vanished without a trace. The house belonged to Miss Finley, an old woman who lived alone. Lonnie’s job wasn’t emergency rescue—he was meant to be the eyes on the storm—but he stopped anyway, to see if he could find her. As he searched the ruins, a truck came flying up. “It was Miss Finley’s son,” said Lonnie. “He said she had gone to the town shelter.”
When you are chasing a cloud, there’s a question of how fast to go. Lonnie perhaps went too fast. Soon he found himself staring at a subdivision of new homes, all destroyed. “I’m looking over at these houses, and all I see is sticks,” he said. Debris was now crashing around his truck. He looked up and saw a huge piece of tin. “I got large stuff falling out the sky,” he said. “I can’t go any further.”
All along, his phone had been ringing. The Weather Channel. CNN. MSNBC. All these TV people were calling to find out what had happened. The truth is, he didn’t know, and it took him a bit of time to figure it out. It turned out that more than two hundred homes in Elk City had been destroyed, along with thirty-eight businesses. A lot of property had been lost. But—and here’s what shocked him—people had mostly kept out of harm’s way. Karen Snyder had refused to leave her cats and had been found, alive and well, with the ruins of her house on top of her. Gene Mikles had called the sheriff to ask if he should seek shelter, had been told that he should, and had started to the shelter but then returned to his home to grab his phone. He’d been found dead on the ground outside. “Only one fatality and eight bruises,” said Lonnie. “What I think happened is that people listened to the warning.” The town shelter had been so crowded that they’d had to lead people into the basement of the fire station.
On the morning of May 16, 2017, purely by chance, a team of researchers in the Storm Prediction Center had been testing a new tornado model. Even after they varied their assumptions about the conditions of the atmosphere, the model generated tornadoes. The images were clear and consistent: later the researchers said it was as if they had seen the storm in the real world. Everyone in the weather business believed this was the future: the ability to predict a tornado, in theory, before it spun up. The ability to imagine it, with precision, before you could see it. Now it was happening. The researchers informed the Weather Service meteorologist on duty, and the meteorologist issued a different kind of alert. Not a warning, but a warning that a warning was very likely coming; and it had prodded Lonnie to behave as he might not have done. It made him feel the threat was real—that the storm might hit him. That feeling had caused him to trigger a warning a few minutes earlier than he might otherwise have done. “The main thing I was so excited about is we were able to set off the sirens thirty minutes before it hit,” he said.
Lonnie Risenhoover knew nothing about what had happened inside the Storm Prediction Center. “That was a prototype,” he said. “It was the first time they’d used it. I didn’t know it.” But he knew what he was hearing from the Weather Service staff sounded different from what he usually heard. They’d given him, in effect, a clearer sense of the odds. They’d done what Kim Klockow had been advocating for: don’t tell people what the tornado will do to them if it hits them. Instead, persuade them that the threat is real. “People in Oklahoma, they’re going to credit the media,” said Lonnie. “Because that’s where they are getting their information. But who they should credit is the Weather Service. The Weather Service—they don’t give themselves enough credit. They say,‘We’re just doing a job.’ But I don’t know where we’d be without them.”
At dinner one night I played a game with Kim Klockow and her friends Hank Jenkins-Smith and Carol Silva, the co-directors of the University of Oklahoma’s Center for Risk & Crisis Management. They’d devoted their lives to studying people’s response to risk. I’d wondered who, and what, was most likely to survive a tornado. If you were a tree, for instance, you’d much rather be a willow than an oak, as a willow tree bends. The risk experts all agreed they’d bet money on a horse over a cow, and on a dog over a cat. (“Dogs are more likely to obey.”) They became less certain when we turned to the more complicated matter of human beings. Because they were intellectually honest academics, they were reluctant to generalize. “People aren’t necessarily good at managing one kind of risk just because they are good at managing another kind of risk,” said Carol. “People will be deathly afraid of one kind of risk and blasé about another.”
Still, they played along, in a hypothetical game of survival. They all agreed that you’d obviously bet money on a rich person over a poor person. (“People who live in mobile homes are thirty times more likely to die.”) They’d take a parent over a pet owner, as animals aren’t allowed in public storm shelters. (“Pets will kill you.”) They argued a bit, but finally decided they’d take a woman over a man, as men tended to be more risk-seeking. “Men go outside and look around,” said Carol. “You see this in the tornado videos on YouTube. The wife sticking her head out the door screaming at her husband,” Hey, git your ass inside!’” Finally, I asked: a liberal or a conservative? Eighty-three and a half percent of Beckham County had voted for Donald Trump. What did that say about their ability to survive a tornado? The liberal has the advantage of trusting the government’s warning, said Hank, but the conservative has advantages, too. It depended on what kind of conservative he was, they decided. If he was a radical individualist, he was a bad risk: you’d bet on the liberal to survive. But if the conservative belonged to a strong social network—a church, say—he might hear a tornado warning, and trust it, before it was too late. “What you need is one person inside the network who is a trusted source, who trusts the government,” said Hank. You need Lonnie Risenhoover.
I had in mind a final game of survivor, but I never got around to asking them about it. Who is more likely to survive a tornado: the person who has personally experienced one, or the person who has not, and why? The advantage of experience is more or less obvious; the disadvantage of not having had the experience less so. But it might be the more important factor. All kinds of things might happen to you in life. By sheer accident only a few of them do. That tiny subset shapes your view of the world, to an alarming degree. If a tornado has never hit your town, you think it never will. You might try to imagine what will befall you if it does. The reality of the thing will still shock you.
In the weeks after the Elk City tornado, Lonnie Risenhoover toured the damage with various government officials. A man from the Federal Emergency Management Agency came through to determine who was eligible for disaster relief. While driving the man around Elk City, Lonnie spotted Miss Finley. Her house was a ruin and her barn was gone: surely she was eligible for relief. Lonnie stopped so the FEMA guy might speak with her. “You know,” said Miss Finley, “for the last ten years I prayed for a tornado to come and take that barn. I didn’t think it would take the house, too.” She seemed to think her reasoning self-evident. The FEMA guy said he didn’t understand: Why had she been praying for a tornado to take her barn? “Every time I pull out of the driveway I’m looking at that red barn,” she said. “And every time I pull into the driveway I’m looking at the red barn.” At which point Lonnie asked the FEMA guy if he was ready to leave. He wasn’t. He was still puzzled: Why did it bother the woman to look at her red barn? “That barn,” said Miss Finley, “is where my husband committed suicide ten years ago.”
And so you might have good reason to pray for a tornado, whether it comes in the shape of swirling winds, or a politician. You imagine the thing doing the damage that you would like to see done, and no more. It’s
what you fail to imagine that kills you.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I’d like to thank Graydon Carter for a fabulous decade-long run at Vanity Fair that ended with the second chapter of this book. It was never obvious that anyone would want to read what had interested me about the United States government. Doug Stumpf, my magazine editor for the past decade, persuaded me that, at this strange moment in American history, others might share my enthusiasm. As the material mushroomed into a book and threatened to receive more attention than I expected, I was relieved and grateful that Janet Byrne agreed once again to make me appear to be a better writer than I am. And I’m not sure what I would do without Starling Lawrence, who has edited my books since I began writing them. Podcasts?
ALSO BY MICHAEL LEWIS
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Flash Boys
The Big Short
Boomerang
Home Game
The Blind Side
Coach
Moneyball
Next
The New New Thing
Losers
Pacific Rift
The Money Culture
Liar’s Poker
The Fifth Risk Page 16