The Man Who Caught the Storm

by Brantley Hargrove

This is the first time Tim has ever taken orders on a chase, and he finds the arrangement chafing. Every chaser makes his or her fair share of bad calls, but it’s just harder to abide them when the mistake is someone else’s. For an independent worker like Tim, it’s like being muzzled. There are growing “tensions,” Seimon says, “difficult personalities.” The streak of fruitless days stretches on. As they tick by, even the NatGeo guys are fed up.

  Eleven days into the mission, Tim calls a meeting in a fit of pique. With Pietrycha and Seimon gathered in his shaded Lakewood driveway, the white minivan loaded with probes and luggage, Tim unburdens himself. He says he’s prepared to back out of the effort and go independent. He doesn’t shout—he rarely, if ever, raises his voice—but he’s forceful: The mission cannot continue this way. If he is to remain aboard, he wants greater input in the selection of targets, and the freedom to follow his own instincts. “I don’t work this way. I can’t work this way,” he says. Seimon is stunned. He understands Tim’s frustration as well as any, but they had all agreed at the outset to defer to Rasmussen. “He came across as a hothead,” Seimon says. After a little begging and cajoling, the three strike an agreement that will keep Tim aboard and allow a greater measure of autonomy.

  Following the powwow, their fortunes do not improve. Even with more independence, Tim doesn’t come close to a worthwhile deployment in the first twenty days. On June 11, near Benson, Minnesota, frustrations reach a climax. At the rear of the convoy, Seimon briefly glimpses a large tornado, half-hidden in the rain. Judging by the radio traffic, it doesn’t seem as though anyone else has seen it. Seimon knows he isn’t supposed to occupy radio bandwidth during operations, but feels compelled to cut in. He argues that they should be chasing this confirmed tornado by sight alone. But the convoy keeps moving. Rasmussen is guiding them from afar with radar. The trouble is, the radar updates only once every five minutes or so; they’re making their most time-sensitive decisions with outdated information. To Seimon, it feels as if they’re driving away from the objective. To Tim, it runs completely counter to how he chases: if the visible facts on the ground change, respond to them.

  The convoy knocks itself out of position. It’s left flailing in the tornado’s wake, forced to navigate around an obstacle course of fallen trees and power lines in a hopeless stab at catching a storm fleeing at forty miles per hour.

  The next day, the group is in far-western South Dakota, tailing a storm that’s dropping tornado after tornado—some six in all—none of which crosses a navigable road. When the storm finally passes over US 385, just south of the Black Hills, the tornado lifts, leaving them to clutch at a chaos of nontornadic winds. Even when the team manages to cohere and cooperate, it seems, the tornadoes refuse to do the same.

  A week later, Tim’s hopes for the season are dashed altogether. The team becomes separated, leaving Tim, Seimon, and the NatGeo crew in Nebraska for the night, while Pietrycha and the mesonets stay three hours east, in South Dakota. After 15,000 miles and a month of nearly continuous chasing, everyone is fried. The crew needs sleep, and there should be time to rendezvous in the morning.

  Dawn arrives with news of potential in southern Minnesota. They may yet salvage the expedition in its final days. But as the two groups drive throughout the morning, the window shifts. The warm front that will force storm development surfaces farther northeast, in Wisconsin. If Pietrycha hurries, he’ll make it just in time for the intercept. But there is no way Tim and Seimon can cover that amount of ground. To make matters worse, they’ve lost contact with Pietrycha again, and the guidance he’s getting from a forecaster at the National Weather Service office in Dodge City, Kansas. Hopelessly out of striking range and operating in the blind, Tim ends up puttering around St. Cloud.

  Only later does he learn about the half-mile wedge that raided Siren, Wisconsin. It uprooted hardwoods and sheared through homes. The town’s warning system remained silent—damaged by a lightning strike just a month before—and three people were killed. The only flickering bright spot is that Pietrycha was there, in position with his mesonet team. They gathered a vanishingly rare and complete set of measurements, a scientific coup. It’s one solid building block toward an eventual, potentially lifesaving understanding of the storm—a small but valuable success for Pietrycha and the expedition.

  For Tim’s own mission, however, the entire season is a bust. From May 20 to June 20, he has traveled some 15,000 miles and spent weeks away from his wife and children. Yet for all his restless traipsing, the turtle remains untested. Tim limps back to Colorado and returns HITPR to its place in the basement.

  In the off-season, a notion begins to harden into conviction in Tim: he is a chaser who doesn’t need another man’s forecast to find tornadoes. He vows to trust in his own cunning beneath the storm. He won’t tether himself to a cumbersome entourage, no matter how decorated. The season is too short and too precious to hand away. One chaser, with his foot on the gas, is worth twenty experts arguing over directions.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  * * *

  THE TOREADOR

  BUILDING A DEVICE that will remain immobile in winds strong enough to hurl railcars was the easy part. For all the years Tim has handled weapons designed to destroy on massive scales, the testing has always been meticulously controlled, each variable understood and accounted for. High explosives often require a deliberate dose of energy to detonate. There are fail-safes in place, strict layers of firing-system checks. Warheads may contain awesome power, but that power is unleashed only on his mark.

  There are good reasons why the quest Tim is now undertaking has never been realized. It’s not just the messiness of a large-scale chase. Even when Tim has been able to chart his own course, he still operates in a world that is, by its very nature, in flux. Unlike on the test range, he controls nothing beneath the storm. Every object is a missile, every passing telephone pole a potential crushing blow, every dirt road a quagmire. There’s a thin line between too close to the tornado, and too far. His life—and the fate of his mission—depends on knowing the difference, and on minimizing every infinitesimal variable within his power.

  On February 16, 2002, Tim meets with Seimon at an IHOP in Lakewood to discuss a new NatGeo grant proposal. The pair now imagine a stripped-down mission, its scope winnowed to a single objective. No mesonets, no instructions phoned in from Boulder, no unmanned drones—just Tim’s probe and perhaps a small media crew from National Geographic. Tim argues that the mission’s command structure should likewise be simplified. Strong-willed chasers are bound to argue to the point of paralysis over which target to pursue. One person, Tim says, should be charged with making the ultimate decision when there is no consensus. And Tim believes he should be the one to make the call.

  As they settle in at the table, he hands Seimon a single page of typed notes—a manifesto of sorts—that he proposes should govern field operations going forward. “This mission is ALL ABOUT getting In-situ measurements with no allowance for other programs to interfere,” he writes. In other words, they want to make history: pierce the heart of the tornado or bust. He continues: Each morning the team will convene to discuss the forecast, but “being that I am responsible for the fielding of these probes, I have the final decision if there are any differences of opinion.” The manifesto strikes a surprisingly, uncharacteristically authoritarian tone. Yet Tim must have the rigid hierarchy of the previous mission in mind when he writes in one final caveat, “There will be no ‘dictating’ on the target. The subject is always open to suggestion and review.”

  Since last year, Tim’s attitude has hardened. He’s a more focused, more intense man. He’s been hard at work, building eight turtles, which he plans to deploy at intervals to sample multiple transects through the tornado. Seimon gamely offers to take several, reasoning that a second deployment team will increase the likelihood of a hit. But Tim flatly refuses to part with even one. His chasing long ago crossed from hobby to obsession; now it’s almost as though his fate and that of th
e turtle are bound together. The animating cause of his life is the fervent belief that his invention will be the exception, the breakthrough. If anyone is going to make history with the turtle, it isn’t going to be Seimon. It can only be Tim.

  Through February and into March, Seimon corresponds with other scientists who might round out the mission’s forecasting capabilities; though he considers himself a specialist in High Plains storms, he’s still occasionally baffled by those to the east. In late April, however, Seimon gets bad news: the Expeditions Council of the National Geographic Society has declined to fund their grant proposal.

  It’s a blow, especially so close to the start of the season, especially since Seimon’s work still feels unfinished after failing to “land the big fish” last year. Still, he vows to help Tim accomplish his objective in whatever way he can. The two have developed a strong rapport, and Seimon admires Tim’s commitment. After regrouping, they decide to string together a series of chases out of their own pockets. All they really need is a driver and a navigator, and a little money for gas and motels. They wanted simplicity, after all. Now they’re going back to basics.

  For Tim, the loss of NatGeo contains something of a silver lining. There’s no hierarchy, no holder of purse strings. He has always cut an odd trail of his own invention. This doesn’t seem so different. The turtle and the mission are in his own hands: he is free to charge at the core as he sees fit.

  Through the spring and early summer of 2002, Tim and Seimon fall into the grinding rhythms of storm chasing—a week on the road here, a couple of weeks there, whenever and wherever the weather models betray a glimmer of hope. Tim has saved up his vacation time at ARA, and if he needs an extra day or two, he pulls weekend shifts to stay within the bounds of company policy. On some days, Seimon rides along. When he can’t come, Tim invites his friends—guys who can spare a few days to hold a camera, split the cost of a motel room, keep him company, and raise his spirits when things look bleak. To a one, they believe in his mission and have been infected with his passion. The roster includes colleague Julian Lee, Tim’s neighbor Brad Carter, and his brother-in-law, Pat Porter.

  It isn’t quite like Tim and Porter’s previous carefree pursuits in Lipscomb County, Texas, and the like. Tim is chasing harder now. He keeps to the road with religious zeal, staying out longer than he ever has. One by one, his companions cycle through, unable to keep pace. They have to return to their jobs and families. Tim is the only constant. ARA gives him as much space as it can; the crew knows how badly Tim wants to prove HITPR. Within the Samaras household, too, Kathy recognizes that a new drive has taken ahold of Tim. “I could see how excited he would be about it, and how interested he was,” she says. “He felt like he was doing good.” The lengthy work trips for DRI and ARA had long become a part of the household rhythm. His life on the road, Kathy says, “was part of who he was.” Now, that part of him is engulfed in a singular hunt for the storm.

  As the months wear on, though, the distances feel longer and wearier. Due to the paucity of meal options in sparsely populated regions where tornadoes most often occur, Tim is forced to subsist on grub at greasy diners, or to scavenge food from the nearest Allsup’s convenience store when nothing else is open. He then calls Kathy and beds down for the night in some down-in-the-mouth motel with holes in the drywall and a dead cockroach awaiting him on the bathroom floor. If the next day’s target is far away, he catches only a few hours of fitful sleep before it’s time to hit the road again.

  Over unspeakable miles of flyover country in a single season, the long sedentary hours exact their toll. Some chasers joke that they can practically feel the clots forming in their legs. Tim’s companions marvel at how ably he weathers the chase (and maintains his trim physique). The missed tornadoes and busts are the only vicissitudes that sap his resilience.

  To Julian Lee, Tim reveals an entire subculture Lee scarcely knew existed. At some depopulated crossroads, they’ll find a dozen or so chasers who have all reached the same conclusion about the weather to arrive at precisely the same place. They pass the time as most chasers do, speculating on the timetable for storm initiation, studying road maps, plotting target locations, and telling war stories about storms of the past. Before long, everyone is facing the sky, appraising cumulus towers as though judging prized cattle. The “crispier” they look, the better. Inevitably, a debate breaks out over the strength of the tornado that has yet to form. It could be augured by a particularly curvaceous hodograph—the line trace that represents wind shear. Or it could all hinge on the penetrability of the cap, the layer of stable air that acts like a lid on storms.

  Eventually, Mother Nature puts a stop to the arguing. The cap will break. The cumulus towers will become cumulonimbus mountains. And the chasers will light out, leaving contrails of dust down back roads.

  Until Lee began chasing with Tim, he never fully understood that he already spoke the mathematical language of storms. Fluid mechanics is his specialty, and in the sky it finds one of its grandest expressions. The explosive, hundred-mile-per-hour vertical growth of towering clouds is an awe-inspiring manifestation of the simple tendency for warm, moist air to rise. The sky, he now sees, is an ocean of latent energy. Life depends on the benign expenditure of that energy. Yet a rare process can transmute it into a knife’s edge capable of horrific carnage. Chasing “gave me respect for how much energy is in the air we breathe,” Lee says. “It’s something I’d never worked out until talking to Tim and those guys. There were a lot of things I’d learned in textbooks about turbulent flow, wakes, and vortices that I could see in the lab, but I didn’t realize they happen at such a large scale in nature.” Out here, the experiments span state lines, evolving from one moment to the next with infinite variation.

  The other thing Lee learns on the road is just how difficult it is to find tornadoes.

  Tim misses an outbreak stretching from the Midwest to the Mid-Atlantic in April 2002. Six people die, and dozens of tornadoes, including a powerful F4 in Charles County, Maryland, cause hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of damage. But the hills and forests of the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic are beyond his territory; Tim requires flat land and predictable, gridded roads on which to navigate.

  On May 7 he gets a near miss on a probe—closer than he’s ever been—outside Pratt, Kansas. The nearest turtle measures a twenty-four-millibar barometric-pressure drop and a peak wind gust of seventy miles per hour at the northern edge of the funnel—it’s so close he could have hurled a rock into the tornado. But close isn’t enough. His probe must pierce the heart. “There’s a hell of a lot of disappointment,” Carter says. “You spend all that time and effort, and then you miss it, just by a little bit.”

  But failure, in this case, isn’t without value. Tim is learning that to accomplish what no researcher has before, he must get closer than any has dared. Like the toreador who waits until the last moment to pivot from the bull’s horns, Tim will have to stand in the path just before escape becomes impossible. Carter isn’t sure whether this is a good thing. But whatever Tim’s reservations, he has now grown comfortable in proximities that would have terrified him a few years ago.

  For all the many miles Tim and his ragtag crew cover, again, the 2002 season ends without success. Tim retreats to lick his wounds and gear up for next year’s battle. But the storm will not wait; fall holds a surprise event in bad terrain. In the early afternoon of November 9—an unseasonable month for an outbreak—the first tornado touches down in Arkansas. And they don’t stop coming. Dozens rake across the South and up through the lower Ohio Valley. One out of every six is what NOAA refers to as a “killer.”

  At 5:40 p.m. on November 10, there are simultaneous outbreaks occurring in an almost-continuous line of supercells from Louisiana to Lake Erie. The mile-wide wedge that enters Van Wert, Ohio, tosses a car through the wall of a movie theater. It lands on empty seats in the front row. Another vortex comes to Mossy Grove, Tennessee, in the night. The people who live there had believed Lone Mou
ntain would shield them. But street after street is mounded with rubble, and five of their own are dead. In the town of Clark, Pennsylvania, the body of an eighty-one-year-old man is discovered in his basement, buried beneath the ruin of his home. Clark had received only a severe-thunderstorm warning, six minutes before the tornado arrived. The tornado warning came two minutes after the twister was gone.

  By the time the sun rises on the eleventh, Veterans Day, thirty-six have been killed. Deadly, destructive, unpredictable. Tim has been in the presence of the fastest wind on earth more than almost anyone else alive. But when a tornado leaves the empty fields and enters a town, he is still astounded by the way the air—without an igniting charge or an explosive compound—can act like a bomb’s shock front. Sometimes people know it’s coming, and sometimes they don’t. In either scenario, the best we can do is hunker down as people always have and hope the wind will miss. A chaser can either stand by, or he can do something about it. Tim doubles down on the probe.

  CHAPTER NINE

  * * *

  STRATFORD, TEXAS

  THE 2003 TORNADO season arrives like a reset. A new year, fresh with possibility. Tim is able to venture back out instead of watching helplessly from afar. He keeps a close eye on the predictive weather models, as they show early promise. Then May 15 dawns like a gift from the storm gods.

  The Texas Panhandle sky is flooded with combustible atmospheric fuel from the Gulf of Mexico, and the unstable mass is on a collision course with dry western air and a howling, fifty-knot current moving east at 18,000 feet. Tim knows only that something could happen, not that it will. But the potential is enough to prompt him and Anton Seimon to pile into the minivan and depart from his Lakewood driveway at nine in the morning.