by Holly Bailey
Starting in the 1970s, thousands of meteorologists moved to Oklahoma to be close to the severe weather. The meteorology school at OU became the largest program in the country—with more than five hundred students enrolled and hundreds more turned away every year simply because there was no room for them. Those who didn’t get in sometimes came to Oklahoma anyway, and they studied Mother Nature on their own, packing the roads alongside other meteorologists from all over the country who came to study Oklahoma’s legendary storms. A running joke in Oklahoma when I was growing up was that during the spring you couldn’t throw a rock without hitting a weather scientist. They were everywhere.
Howard Bluestein hit the open road almost as soon as he arrived. It wasn’t long before he experienced his first tornado, and even now he remembers it in specific detail. It was May 20, 1977, when he and a group of students chased a giant tornado that hit the ground in Tipton, a tiny town in the southwest near the Texas border. Driving down a narrow country road, he stopped the car when he saw a silhouette of a vortex crossing the road directly in front of them. Tall and slender like an elephant’s trunk, it looked like none of the photographs he’d ever seen. He began to photograph it, the first of many pictures he would take of the thousands of tornadoes he would see in his career.
The excitement of seeing something he had been captivated by for so many years sent adrenaline coursing through his veins, but afterward Bluestein felt guilty. Driving up the road, he found a house missing its roof and scores of power lines that had been ripped apart and thrown to the ground. It was minor damage compared with the things he would see later in life, but he suddenly felt a sickening feeling. How could he have been so excited to see a storm that might have killed someone? It was a tension that everyone who follows storms for a living will at some point experience: You want the storms to be interesting, and when you are chasing one, you have that feeling of anticipation, that excitement and hope that it will develop and produce the tornado you so desperately want to see and study. But that desire often competes with the guilt of knowing how truly terrible storms will ruin people’s lives. Over the years, Bluestein had to remind himself and his students, who went through the same emotions, that they were doing research that would contribute to saving people’s lives, that they were not complicit in the devastation, though they were its witnesses.
Back in the 1970s almost nothing was known about what was happening inside a tornado. Radar technology offered only so much insight. Bluestein knew that the secret to understanding tornadoes was to somehow get inside them—to measure the winds and gather data on their structure so as to gauge what was happening inside the storms at the moment when they produced a funnel. People had dreamed up ways of doing this before, but none had come to fruition. In the 1970s a scientist offered to drive an armored tank into the path of a tornado, but it was dismissed as a crazy idea—though storm chasers almost thirty years later would eventually do just that. In 1979 Bluestein met Al Bedard and Carl Ramzy, two scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and together they came up with the idea of racing ahead of a tornado and deploying a device in its path that would be strong enough to withstand the winds and sophisticated enough to provide actual data about what was going on inside the storm. At a cocktail party in the summer of 1980, the trio, slightly inebriated, came up with the name of their four-hundred-pound, barrel-shaped device: the Totable Tornado Observatory, or TOTO, named after Dorothy’s dog in The Wizard of Oz.
The following spring Bluestein and his colleagues tried to put TOTO in front of a tornado, but almost every time, as if it knew what they were up to, the tornado shifted course or simply lifted up and disappeared back into the sky. As the men struggled to get the massive machine loaded back into their truck, lighting often struck around them, exposing them to another danger: The device was basically a lightning rod in the middle of storms. In 1982 Bluestein and his team began to take risks they’d never thought they would in a desperate effort to intercept a tornado. Near Altus, Oklahoma, they drove directly into a storm. Their caravan of cars was pelted with gigantic hailstones and shaken by winds that seemed likely to blow them off the road at any moment. They were putting their lives at risk, Bluestein realized, but the allure of scientific discovery was too great to resist. They raced forward, trying to catch the tornado, but suddenly realized they were too close. The twister crossed the road just to their right, about one hundred yards from the front of their truck. This was closer than Bluestein had ever been before. Power lines fell across the road, shattering the windshield of their van. As they watched in horror, the tornado uprooted trees and destroyed a nearby mobile home. It was a close call, but even then they were not able to deploy their machine in time.
Over the years, Bluestein and his researchers would try again, but in the end it was simply too dangerous. A team from the Severe Storms Lab tried for a few more years, and in the spring of 1985 they almost succeeded. But a weak tornado near Ardmore blew the machine over, and it was retired.
TOTO, for all of its failings, eventually made Bluestein and his colleagues famous beyond the science world. The device was the inspiration for the fictional machine “Dorothy” featured in the 1996 movie Twister, which made storm chasers like Bluestein (who was a technical consultant on the film) famous. The film prompted a surge in enrollment at OU, where suddenly everyone wanted to be a storm chaser. At the same time, tornadoes became a burgeoning tourist industry in Oklahoma, as guides led visitors from all over the world on storm-chasing expeditions across the state in the springtime.
Bluestein had mixed feelings about this sudden surge of interest. On the one hand, he loved the fact that the public had begun to engage in the important science of storms—which meant more funding for projects to better understand the genesis of tornadoes and to create better warning systems. But he was unnerved by tourists and amateur storm chasers. Suddenly the empty country roads in Oklahoma were as packed as the Massachusetts Turnpike at rush hour—and he suspected many of the weekend chasers didn’t appreciate how truly dangerous it could be to put yourself in the path of a tornado.
Bluestein wasn’t a daredevil, a fact that sometimes irked his young students, who were hungry to get as close as possible to the storms they chased. He’d had one close call in 1991, when he got within a mile of the tornado and suddenly it turned on him. He was so close he saw the vortex blow a house clean off its foundation right in front of him—sending a bolt of fear through his heart. He survived the storm and came out of it with valuable information, but he vowed never to get that close to a tornado again. He had documented a tornado with winds of more than 280 miles per hour—then categorized as an F5. Nobody had ever seen one with winds that strong before.
Over the years, Bluestein hadn’t slowed down in his never-ending pursuit of the storm. Every spring he and his students would travel as much as 10,000 miles, driving their mobile Doppler radar across Oklahoma and the central plains chasing ever-elusive tornadoes. He’d noticed that the storms seemed to be getting bigger and deadlier—though he wasn’t sure, since records had been virtually nonexistent until the late 1950s. Who knew what their ancestors had seen? Especially in Oklahoma, which had been a wide-open empty space for hundreds of years until the land run of 1889 put it on the path to statehood. While the Native Americans who lived there had amassed wisdom about how to pacify the demon clouds, as they thought of them, their sacred rituals had never been shared outside their tribes.
In 1999 Bluestein and his team were tracking the epic tornado that wiped out a large swath of Moore when they recorded winds of 302 miles per hour—the fastest wind speed ever recorded near the surface of the earth. Bluestein hadn’t recorded another tornado that strong since, but plenty of others were almost equally devastating. He began to notice odd things about the storms—how one year would produce dozens of strong tornadoes, followed by a year when there were almost none. But he couldn’t explain why this was. For all the time and money pu
t into studies and equipment, scientists still knew remarkably little about what made tornadoes form.
Like others, he wondered about the effects of global warming. Could an increase in the earth’s temperature be responsible for creating ever-deadlier storms, especially in Oklahoma, where the warming of the tropical air coming off the Gulf of Mexico might create more instability when it collided with cooler air coming from Canada? But who was to say that rising temperatures up north, which were contributing to the melting of the ice over the North Pole, might not be weakening the cold blasts from the north? It was a question that Bluestein often debated with his colleagues. The truth was they just didn’t know how global warming was impacting the weather in Oklahoma—or whether it was the reason why tornadoes seemed to be getting larger and more inconsistent every season.
All Bluestein could do was press forward. That Sunday night he and his team had had a major breakthrough—right in their own backyard. They had driven their mobile Doppler radar truck with their RaXpol radar close to the tornado that had hit the ground northeast of Norman. It had produced the best data set they had ever gotten on a tornado—a full-scale X-ray of the funnel as it was born, capturing the evolution of the competing updrafts and downdrafts that contributed to the rotation and eventual development of the vortex. Those valuable clues could help unlock the mystery of why some supercell thunderstorms produced tornadoes and others didn’t. It could potentially boost meteorologists’ ability to predict storms and increase warning times in the future. It was a triumph that made the long days of chasing storms worth it.
It had been a late night, and Bluestein had woken up a little groggy. He checked the forecast and saw that they were in for another wild day of storms. As he prepared to meet up with the graduate students who would accompany him on the chase, he considered where to go. The forecast suggested some of the strongest storms would hit in the central part of the state, south of Oklahoma City, right around Moore. He dreaded the thought of trying to drive his mobile Doppler into the area. He knew the streets would be crowded with local news chasers and amateurs, who drove wildly and paid little attention to the rules of the road. Looking at the forecast, he saw there was a strong potential for storms to the south, and so he made the decision that his team should head south on Interstate 35. If it proved to be fruitless, they could always drive back and position closer to Moore.
CHAPTER 5
THE WONDERFUL WEATHER WIZARD
When I was growing up, it sometimes felt like Gary England was everywhere, an omnipresent, benevolent deity who popped up at the mere mention of a storm. His picture was branded on tornado safety brochures handed out at schools, libraries, and grocery-store checkout lanes and regularly plastered on billboards all over Oklahoma City and its suburbs, looming larger than life over the roads. His grin, so familiar one could almost hear his folksy twang and the happy chuckle that often interrupted forecasts on sunny days, was set against an ominous backdrop of storm clouds and lightning. “Oklahoma’s #1 meteorologist,” the ads read. “The most trusted name in weather . . . There when it matters most.”
To outsiders the billboards must have seemed an odd juxtaposition: the smiling weatherman seemingly giddy in the midst of the apocalypse, like the mythical Wizard of Oz behind the storms. He was such a cult hero in Oklahoma during my childhood that many found it hard to separate him from the storms he covered. To some he simply was the weather, the human face and voice of the atmospheric drama they were subjected to every spring.
England didn’t particularly like to be associated with terrible storms that killed people and left unspeakable damage in their wake, but he couldn’t deny that it was the weather and its mystery that truly animated him. He never felt more alive than when he was trying to outwit Mother Nature and keep people safe. He was almost always plotting and anticipating the next big storm. Being a meteorologist was more than a full-time job: It was his calling, a religion. The weather was his life—and in many ways that was what we had come to expect of those who dared to predict the path of the next big storm.
To be a television meteorologist in Oklahoma, it was not enough to be comfortable on camera or to possess the ability to deliver accurate forecasts. In a part of the country where people feared storms but were also mesmerized and thrilled by them, something more was expected of those entrusted with channeling the wild weather every spring. Our TV weathermen and weatherwomen had to have the smarts and drive of a scientist, the reporting skills of a journalist, and an acutely attuned sense of theater—because for most of us, the storms were a fact of life and a terrible scourge, but they were also a form of entertainment.
When a patch of bad weather blew up, all three major television channels in Oklahoma City would go live with uninterrupted coverage, partly by necessity, as deadly storms put their viewers’ lives at risk, but also driven by demand in a state populated by unabashed storm junkies. The wall-to-wall coverage often had the tense feel of a man-versus-nature disaster movie, a life-and-death battle between the weathermen and the storms they covered. It featured a cast of supporting characters who were part daredevil, part hero as they ventured deep into the violent heart of the storm to give viewers a rare glimpse of the monster at work. The head meteorologists anchoring the coverage back at the station were like Luke Skywalker to the storm’s Darth Vader, brave warriors on the side of good fighting the forces of evil.
England was revered as the founding father of modern-day storm coverage, but there were younger men nipping at his heels. KFOR’s Mike Morgan was his fiercest rival, followed by KOCO’s Damon Lane, the fresh-faced upstart weathering his first spring storm season as the head meteorologist at Channel 5. They were all wizards of the weather, shamans of the storm who could conjure an alchemical combination of wisdom and magic. In them one could detect varying degrees of the fire and brimstone of a Holy Roller preacher desperate to save souls from the blazing pits of hell—a character all too familiar to residents of Bible Belt Oklahoma. But there was also the authoritative tone of an unshakable action-film hero there to save the day, because viewers were looking not just for a forecaster but for a hero, one who would stop at nothing to save them from the storm.
To be a weather savior in Oklahoma took a mix of energy, grit, and courage, along with the ability to manage one’s emotions in the face of killer storms. Oklahoma’s weather gods also had to possess one essential skill that was even harder to attain: the art of knowing the weather so well that they could somehow collect the clues to anticipate its next move. To some of us it seemed almost like magic, though like all good magic it required a great deal of mastery. It was more than just reading radar data. It required an ingrained sense deep within, a gut feeling of what the storm would do.
• • •
After four decades and thousands of storms, Gary England was incontestably one of these storm whisperers. More than anyone, he appreciated how far weather forecasting had come, how much technology had changed his profession and added precious minutes to warning times. But as much as he relied on the new radars and technology, he was also a believer in that gut feeling he had about the weather, that suffocating sense he would get that something bad was coming. And as he drove to the KWTV studio that Monday morning, he had an uneasy feeling that this time the worst might happen close to home. A tornado was bad anywhere, but it was a nightmare scenario when it took aim at a city. As he tapped his fingers on the steering wheel and waited for the light to change, eager to get to work and check the radar, England hoped this time his gut was wrong. But it rarely was.
Over the years, he had come to feel a little like a battlefield commander. Most people were aware only of the hours he spent on air every spring warning of approaching storms and then diligently talking through them as they hit, tracking them down to the exact streets where people needed to take shelter or get out of the way. What they didn’t see were the hours he spent off air meticulously gaming out every possible strategy for how to cover the sto
rms. He was not a man with many hobbies. Sometimes he played golf, but he wasn’t any good at it and he often found himself back home thinking about the weather, obsessing over the station’s coverage and considering what it should do differently in the future. His entire life revolved around anticipating that next big storm. And on the days when he knew bad weather was coming, he contemplated the station’s coverage much as a general analyzes the theater of war, plotting where to deploy his “ground troops,” as he called them. They were his army of storm chasers who raced toward a tornado on the ground and in the sky and got as close as possible—sometimes too close, England thought—to gauge its strength and direction so that he could warn the people in its path.
Radar projections often gave a good idea of where the moist, warm air off the Gulf of Mexico would collide with the dry, cool air sweeping down from Canada. The unstable atmosphere triggered by that volatile mix fueled the most ferocious thunderstorms, but the collision line often extended hundreds of miles across the state. England’s job was to determine where to position his chasers, who were outfitted with sophisticated high-definition cameras that streamed live images of what they were seeing in the sky around them back to the station—and ultimately to the world.