The Mercy of the Sky: The Story of a Tornado

by Holly Bailey

  Over the last forty years researchers have become increasingly skilled at detecting and forecasting the environment most prone to creating tornadoes. In the beginning there is usually a thunderstorm that, in the simplest terms, erupts when warm and cool air fronts collide. The warm air rises, pushed up by the cooler air, and as its temperature drops, it releases moisture, generates energy, and causes instability. Sometimes the outcome is just rain and lightning, a result of the energy created when frozen raindrops collide in the upper echelon of the clouds. But in Oklahoma the base ingredients are more volatile. Intensely moist air from the Gulf of Mexico will often collide with cool, dry air wafting down from Canada over the Rockies, and the two forces are further churned together by the jet stream, a fast-moving current that flows west to east directly over the state. Scientists have observed that the jet stream causes the warm, sticky air to rise more quickly, in what is called an updraft, and the cool, dry air to fall in a downdraft.

  When the elements are particularly unstable—when, for instance, one finds significantly varied temperatures and moisture levels—those crosscurrents will sometimes coalesce in a supercell. That is when tornadoes are sometimes produced. Supercells are longer lasting and more dangerous than other storms because their updraft of warm air is often ever so slightly tilted, feeding more surface moisture into the storm. This causes the winds to rotate ever more furiously and to form a vortex of air known as a mesocyclone, which is visible on radar if not to the naked eye. It is the next step that most baffles meteorologists: In some storms the vortex narrows and lengthens, dropping out of the clouds and aiming for the ground. As it does so, its spin becomes still more furious and lethal. And yet, even if the conditions are ripe, not every supercell will produce a tornado. Scientists still have no idea why that is. Some speculate that it has something to do with the temperature of the air wrapping around the mesocyclone within the storm, but the truth is they simply do not know. Tornadogenesis, the scientific term for how tornadoes are born, remains a frustratingly incomplete science.

  One of the simple reasons for this is the difficulty of amassing reliable data. Who could ever hope to penetrate the eye of a storm and emerge to tell the tale? Even if you could build a strong enough gadget, how could you position it in the right path? The Doppler did not fully resolve the mystery, but it did increase our understanding of the conditions that might lead to the formation of tornadoes and thereby significantly increased warning times. On May 19 the meteorologists at the National Weather Service saw the possible tornado coming almost fifteen minutes before it nearly hit them—an eternity in forecasting terms—thanks to their Doppler radar.

  As emergency sirens began to wail, nonessential staff rushed downstairs to a partially underground theater, where live coverage of the storm from the local television stations was being projected on screens. Gary England was on—as were his counterparts at the other stations: KFOR’s Mike Morgan and KOCO’s Damon Lane. At one point there was an odd moment when the researchers and students in the room found themselves staring at three separate live pictures of the sky literally right outside their door as increasingly frantic storm chasers raced down the back roads of Norman trying to stay ahead of the storm. It wasn’t just chasers working for the local television stations; there were amateurs out there too, whose vehicles were outfitted with cameras that recorded their surroundings. It had a bit of the feel of a bad disaster movie. There was an edge in the room, but no one panicked. Some were actually disappointed. The students in the room who had come to OU to study storms like this itched to get outside or go on the roof of the building, to the open-air classroom where on certain days they were invited to sit at desks and study the sky around them. But that day they were told it was too dangerous: They would have to wait for another storm.

  Upstairs, top officials at the Weather Service were considering what would happen if they were to take a direct hit. In anticipation of Oklahoma’s wild weather, the facility had been built out of bulletproof glass and the walls reinforced with Kevlar. They were said to be able to withstand winds of 250 miles per hour, and a backup power generator could supposedly keep the building running for three days. But nobody knew if this was actually true. It had yet to be tested. Though a few small twisters had hit in the seven years since the building had been erected, the worst storms had bypassed Norman, either heading to the north, toward Moore, or staying south.

  Smith and his colleagues calmly went over the backup plan, reviewing how they would relocate their staff to the Weather Service’s old headquarters on the north side of town near the airport. Satellite agency offices around the region were on standby to take over operations if the worst happened. Still, it was hard to fathom a direct hit. Smith could hardly believe a storm capable of producing a tornado was literally in their backyard, taking aim at the people whose job it was to warn and protect the public. Mother Nature had one sick sense of humor.

  The National Weather Service issued an official warning, telling everyone in Norman to take cover—a point Smith reiterated on Twitter. “DO NOT look for it,” he tweeted. “Take cover right now!” In Oklahoma people will sometimes stay out in their front yards to watch approaching storms, their curiosity and awe trumping any natural sense of fear. The country singer Toby Keith, who grew up in Moore, had even written a song about the phenomenon—“Trailerhood”—which poked fun at people who, when the storm sirens blare, race outside with “a six pack and a lawn chair” waiting for the tornado to come. Even meteorologists aren’t immune. As they warned people to take cover and move into shelters or relocate to interior rooms, some of the scientists in the office left their cubicles and ran to the windows to watch the storm taking shape just west of the building. It was a rare opportunity for people who spent their professional lives tracking twisters on radar to physically see one with their own eyes unfolding before them. Smith was right there with them—watching the storm with the same curiosity and fear that had captivated him as a kid.

  One of his earliest weather memories was of being frozen in fear at claps of thunder so loud they shook his house. He ran to his parents, terrified by the darkening clouds that seemed as if they were out to get him. But that fear soon turned into fascination, and the next thing he knew, he was standing outside as the storm approached, looking up at the sky, unable to tear his eyes away. That fascination—the awe of what Mother Nature could do—was what had driven him to become a meteorologist. He wanted to understand what was happening in the sky around him. Almost everybody who worked in weather for a living had a similar story—the storm that had hooked them for life.

  As precarious as Sunday’s storm had appeared, the tornado had stayed in the clouds as it passed over Norman, sparing the Weather Service a direct hit. It had touched the ground a short while later northeast of town, in the wide-open farmland east of Moore, rapidly increasing to an EF4 tornado with winds approaching 200 miles per hour. It had wiped out a mobile-home park and heavily damaged or destroyed dozens of homes before crossing Interstate 40, where it picked up several tractor-trailer trucks and slammed them to the ground, shattering them into pieces. Among the farmhouses it had hit was one belonging to my aunt.

  As night fell and the storms finally fizzled out, Smith and his colleagues had watched local coverage of the tornado damage, accompanied by terrifying up-close footage of the giant twister captured from different angles by storm chasers on the ground and by the local news stations’ helicopters, which had followed it in the air. They had wondered about the death toll—which still hadn’t been released—and considered their own narrow miss. Why had it spared them but not others?

  They’d had little time to stop and ponder the storm’s trajectory. Forecasters on staff were already predicting that another round of storms was on its way Monday—even worse than what they’d seen in recent days. A dry line of air was coming off the Rocky Mountains to the northwest that would collide with unstable tropical moisture pushed up from the Gulf of Mexico—th
e key ingredients for deadly thunderstorms. Radar projections suggested the worst of it would be concentrated right over central Oklahoma. Sometimes you didn’t need the radar to know trouble was brewing. As Smith had left the office early Monday morning, walking out to his car in the dark, he had been hit by a blast of thick, humid air.

  Now, inside the building on the second floor, Smith was at his desk analyzing the forecast again. He saw his boss, David Andra, walk by. Andra looked tense and nervous, which was all the data Smith needed to know it was going to be a rough day. He had scheduled a conference call with city officials in the region and updated the Weather Service’s Twitter feed once that morning—just after 6:30 A.M.—urging his followers to “get ready” for more severe storms that afternoon. At his desk he looked over data suggesting the worst of the weather would begin to fire up around 1:00 P.M.—hours earlier than usual. He thought of the kids who would be in school at that hour. “Attention school systems, parents and students!!” Smith wrote on Twitter. “We may be dealing with dangerous storms at school dismissal time! Plan ahead!”

  He hoped it would be enough, but in the back of his mind he felt a creeping sense of unease.

  CHAPTER 4

  10:00 A.M., MAY 20

  Next to the National Weather Center was a parking lot covered by a giant awning where storm chasers working with the University of Oklahoma and weather agencies kept their trucks, outfitted with mobile radars and other devices. One of the largest of these resembled a king cab pickup on steroids. The bed had been removed, and in the back was a giant mobile Doppler radar that looked a bit like a satellite dish. But it was no ordinary radar.

  The RaXpol—short for Rapid X-Pol—is a polarimetric radar eight feet in diameter that sends out pulse waves into the storm. These can measure it not only horizontally but also vertically, giving scientists a more precise read on its size and shape. Firmly hooked into the back of the truck, the RaXpol can rotate at 180 degrees per second—capturing the full atmospheric blueprint of a tornado in seconds. This speed is important because tornadoes change rapidly—so much so that scientists still don’t have a full grasp of why some storms produce vortices and others don’t, or why some stay on the ground for an hour while others disappear in seconds. They know more than they did twenty years ago, but not enough.

  Next to the truck stood the RaXpol’s operator, Howard Bluestein, who had spent his entire life trying to solve this riddle. A meteorology professor at OU, Bluestein was widely regarded as one of the weather gods among the scientists. He was one of the best-known storm chasers in the world, a man who was out in the field following tornadoes long before the chase became a form of entertainment or, for some, a sport.

  If you had sent out a casting memo for a storm scientist, Bluestein, at sixty-four, would have fit the bill. Standing midheight, with a mat of wiry gray hair, he was known for his distinctive way of dressing while chasing the storms. He almost always wore the same thing: a wrinkled shirt and knee-length khaki shorts with tennis shoes and tall, blindingly white socks. It was the socks that his students and colleagues teased him about. Back in the 1970s they’d gone up only to his ankles, but as he’d gotten older, they had slowly inched up his skinny calves, higher and higher. Part of it was utility: Bluestein was known to sprint through the open, grassy fields of Oklahoma’s countryside with his camera to get a good shot of a tornado. It was often too hot to wear jeans, and his tall white socks were like cotton armor protecting his skin from the fire ants, chiggers, and thorny sticker-burr weeds that were often hidden in the deep grass. But that didn’t stop the teasing. His students took pictures of him ogling tornadoes. “The tornado, Dr. Bluestein and his socks,” one was captioned.

  Bluestein didn’t mind the ribbing. He had a healthy sense of humor and, for a scientist, was remarkably easygoing. His voice was soft and always seemed to have a tinge of awe when he was talking about the weather. He had an almost constant look of joy on his face, especially if you caught him out in the field watching a storm rise up on the wide expanse of the Oklahoma landscape. It never got old. The sky, he told his students, was nature’s finest art museum, with a constantly changing exhibit that could blow you away—not just with its beauty but with its physical power too.

  Bluestein had been at OU since 1976, and over the years his gentle voice had developed a subtle drawl. His students were often surprised to hear he was actually from Massachusetts, just outside Boston. Some had the obvious question: How did a Yankee end up here? While Boston wasn’t known for severe weather, other than its massive snows in the winter, Bluestein could point to that “one storm” that blew through when he was a kid, the one that changed his life and left him transfixed.

  It was June 1953, and he was only four years old at the time. But he could still vividly recall how he’d been outside in the yard playing when the sky had turned a strange, hazy greenish yellow. The wind picked up, and his mother ordered him to come inside. A tornado had been reported in Worcester, about 40 miles to the west—something that was practically unheard of in New England. It was so rare that local television in Boston had interrupted programming to warn of the approaching storm—public tornado warnings did not exist at the time.

  The only tornado he’d ever heard of was the one that carried Dorothy and her dog, Toto, away in The Wizard of Oz. When he protested, not wanting to go inside, his mother warned him that the storm that was coming would snatch him up into the sky and take him away. Little Howie, as he was known, ran into the house and kept his eyes glued to the window, waiting to see if a twister would come and carry him, like Dorothy, to Oz.

  That tornado never made it to Chelsea, the Boston suburb where Bluestein lived, but horrific stories soon circulated of what it had done to Worcester. People spoke of a large, dark cloud of smoke descending on the city with winds no one had ever experienced before. Almost everything in its path was obliterated, including heavy brick buildings that dated back more than a century. The tornado was reported to have marched on for nearly ninety minutes across a span of almost 50 miles, during which time it killed 94 people and injured 1,200. Roughly ten thousand people lost their homes.

  The stories of that storm mesmerized the four-year-old, who was far too young to understand the workings of the weather. Forecasting and the science of storms were almost nonexistent back then, though people had been chasing storms for centuries, drawn by their terrifying power. One of America’s earliest storm chasers was Benjamin Franklin, who became an accidental meteorologist in 1752 when he sought to prove that lightning was a form of electricity, legend has it, by flying a kite attached to a metal key in the middle of a thunderstorm to test whether it would attract a charge.

  But Franklin’s fascination wasn’t limited to lightning. He is credited with being the first person to have noticed that storms typically move from southwest to northeast—a discovery he made in 1753. Two years later, in 1755, he wrote to a friend to tell him of how he’d been chasing “a small whirlwind” on horseback through the Maryland countryside, watching the funnel as it got bigger and bigger. At one point he lashed at it with a whip to see if it could be broken up, but it seemed impervious to his intervention and darted onward into a forest. When limbs began to rain down upon him from the sky, Franklin became “apprehensive of the danger,” he wrote, and stopped, watching as the funnel continued through the trees only to dissipate over a nearby tobacco field.

  Franklin didn’t call what he saw a “tornado.” It isn’t in fact clear when that word was first used. The consensus seems to be that it was most likely a play on tornar, a Spanish word that means “to turn.” Some people called it a twister, and L. Frank Baum wrote that it was a “cyclone” that carried Dorothy and Toto off from Kansas to the great land of Oz, but by then people knew enough about the word “tornado” to fear it. In the late 1800s the U.S. government went so far as to ban the word “tornado” from its internal weather forecasts, distributed mostly within the military, to avoid inciting p
anic. The ban wasn’t lifted until the late 1930s, but even after that the U.S. Army Signal Corps, which was in charge of forecasts at that time, still largely refrained from using the word.

  It wasn’t until 1952 that the government began publicly issuing tornado watches and warnings—though they were widely derided as inaccurate. While people spoke of major storms that had hit in the past, it was only in the 1950s that official scientific records began to be kept of tornadoes—where they had hit, how many people had died, and the extent of the damage. But the records were inconsistent because there was no standard and generally no understanding of how to truly measure the impact of a tornado.

  In 1954 Bluestein’s home was hit by a hurricane with winds so strong they tore the tiles off the roof. He and his parents cowered inside, afraid the winds might tear their home completely apart. Between this storm and the tornado that had hit the year before, Bluestein became obsessed with the atmosphere around him, though there was little information in his secondary-school textbooks about the science of weather. It was too obscure.

  When the time came to think of college, he enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received a doctorate degree in meteorology, focusing his studies on tropical weather and severe storms. In his last year of graduate school in 1976, Bluestein met Edwin Kessler, an MIT graduate who had moved to Oklahoma to head up the National Severe Storms Lab. Kessler suggested that he come to Oklahoma to study the violent weather, but Bluestein’s image of Oklahoma was of a vast dust bowl, something that did not appeal to him whatsoever. Still, he could not resist the lure of the storms, and that summer after graduation, he moved to Norman. Over the years, as he liked to joke, Oklahoma had become something of a paradise to him: a weather junkie in the land of tornadoes.