The wall moves onto the highway, as Tim had predicted. Then the rain curtain swings back around and shields the tornado from TWISTEX’s view. Laubach suggests finding another road to pick up the chase, but Lee urges him to hang on just a little longer. He wants the mesonet sensors to savor the entire evolution of this transformative RFD. There seems to have been a direct correlation between the surge and the tornado’s most exceptional intensity. But because Tim had been unable to deploy on the tornado in its maturity, they lack the data to prove that the surge amplified wind velocity within the vortex. Lee has only the feeling in his gut.
Even more striking is the final RFD surge, currently ongoing, which the mesonets are picking up even as the storm moves away. In contrast to the warmth of the preceding pulse, this one is markedly chillier. The change in temperature must mean it originates from some other place in the storm, where a common downdraft’s evaporative cooling plays a more prominent role. The divergence both in temperature and strength between this and the previous surge could not be any starker. Yet both originated from within the rear-flank downdraft. How could the same downdraft behave so differently within the same storm? This is what Lee and Finley seek to figure out.
In fact, TWISTEX may now be in possession of something priceless. In the long history of atmospheric research, only two coordinated mesonet data sets have ever been collected from top-percentile tornadoes, and one of them is theirs from Manchester. This is now the third in existence, and it documents more than just one surge. They have slices through a handful of RFDs, each with incredibly disparate effects on the storm. The first accompanied tornadogenesis. The second triggered intensification. The third arrived shortly before the tornado’s most extreme damage was documented. And the fourth set in motion its death spiral and coincided with the tornado’s turn to the north. Clearly, the surge is some kind of signal, and potentially even the mechanism behind each stage of vortex evolution. Lee and Finley have reams of data to sift through, and a scientific paper to write. In the years ahead, they’ll have tantalizing new questions to answer: Is the surge a necessary condition for strong tornadoes? Can it be traced to some other environmental condition that might lengthen warning times?
Bowdle is a heady moment for TWISTEX.
Grzych and Carl’s appraisal of the day is less circumspect. The two are positively giddy. “VORTEX2 is freaking shitting their pants right now,” Grzych says.
“They lost big-time,” says Carl.
* * *
The following day, Tim and Carl return to the location where the Bowdle tornado reached peak intensity. They drive down Highway 12 and note the power transmission towers that lie in heaps of line and galvanized-steel lattice. They stop along the road, near what had once been an attractive little pocket of cottonwood trees. Corrugated aluminum is wrapped around the denuded trunks like shoddy armor. They approach what appears to be a sedan, eerily similar to the white Chevy Cobalts used by Lee and Finley’s mesonet. The front and rear ends have either been torn away or shoved into the cabin. An impact with some large object has caved in half of the roof.
“What we’re seeing here is a vehicle that did not originate in this grove of trees,” Carl observes. Indeed, the car had been parked at a home that once stood some seventy-five to a hundred yards away from here.
“It was at some point a missile,” Carl says.
“Yeah, this is certainly a good example of why you’re not safe in a car,” Tim says. “People who try to outrun tornadoes in a car like that? It’s not pretty.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
* * *
A DEAD END, A NEW CHANCE
IN THEIR TWO head-to-head seasons with VORTEX2, Tim and his team have proven themselves beyond a doubt. While the probes fell short in 2009, the program surged back in 2010. At the same time, Wurman’s armada wasn’t able to close on any of the season’s major tornadoes. For TWISTEX’s more competitive members, the underdog crew might’ve even snuck out as the winner over the last two seasons. Next to their transmission-tower-eating Bowdle wedge, VORTEX2’s only complete intercept—the Goshen County, Wyoming, twister in 2009—looks like a dust devil. TWISTEX’s sheer agility allowed it to thrive even next to NSF muscle and the finest mobile tech money could buy.
None of their chases, though, would have been possible without Storm Chasers. In more ways than one, the Discovery Channel show has been a blessing. It kept the mission on the road when funding had all but vanished. And it brought a handful of more worldly benefits as well. For Tim, as Kathy refuses to let him forget, the show has raised his profile from relative unknown to minor celebrity. He had always been a hit at weather conferences, but once Storm Chasers arrived on basic cable, Tim started finding himself approached for autographs in airports. Kathy teases him about his graying hair and asks with mock sincerity whether he should color it before presenting himself to his multitudinous fan base. Tim makes a show of grumbling and says, “If I got gray hair, I got gray hair.”
The influx of funding also helps Tim and Kathy move away from their quiet Lakewood street—now too often congested with mesonets and the Discovery Channel support vehicles—and into a palatial brick compound with thirty-five acres in the foothills east of Denver, near Bennett. Tim found the new place by trawling foreclosure auctions, and the move is a long time coming. For years, he had lamented to Kathy that they’d outgrown Lakewood, that there was no room for a real shop, not to mention that the city had refused to grant him approval to lengthen his hundred-foot ham radio tower.
It’s been a constant dream of Tim’s to own acreage on the plains, where he can erect an antenna farm and chase storms to the east. Even so, the house is unlike anything a middle-class guy raised in a small bungalow would have dared to envision for himself. The couple’s new master suite has a second-floor balcony with stunning views of the Front Range in the west, and the high plains to the east. The entryway and the living room are bathed in the natural light of huge picture windows opening onto a two-story atrium. Though its extravagance appears at odds with Tim’s unshowy practicality, the house also includes several geeky amenities that appeal to him more than any luxurious frills: The basement is vast enough for a hoarder’s profusion of tools and gadgetry. And the expansive four-car garage will become the perfect setting for a state-of-the-art shop, replete with band saws, lathes, drill presses, a Miller arc welder, and a custom vacuum system that can keep the floors clean and fireproof by suctioning and separating hot metal slag and sawdust.
The initial transition from cozy bungalow to echoing mansion is a little jarring. This isn’t us, Kathy thinks at first. But now that they’re settling in, she and Tim are both getting used to it. From their bedroom balcony, the Milky Way lights up the nighttime sky, and the sunrise unfurls a hundred miles of plains before them. It is no exaggeration when Tim looks out and tells her, “I can see thunderstorms in Kansas.”
Yet, as many doors as the Discovery Channel has opened, there are catches to contractually obligating oneself to reality television. They reveal themselves in due course.
The most obvious and expected are the cameras. For at least two months of the year, Tim now lives under a microscope, with a lens never more than a few feet away. From dawn to dusk, the cameras hover near. Curiously, the camera operators and producers have chosen to hew closely to Tim and Carl, to the exclusion of the rest of the team. Laubach gets a line of dialogue here and there. And given his excitability, Matt Grzych is installed in the probe truck by the producers. For this, Grzych and Laubach are paid talent fees. The expenses for the rest of the team—gas, lodging, food, equipment repairs—come out of Tim’s pocket. As far as the show runners are concerned, Bruce Lee and Cathy Finley’s mesonet fleet—fully half of TWISTEX—does not exist. “They don’t want anything that looks like Tim isn’t the only leader of this project,” Lee says. “They have their own story line. We basically caused them a whole lot of editing.”
Otherwise, the first two seasons of shooting have transpired much as the TWISTEX
team had anticipated. Storm Chasers adheres to a standard Discovery Channel reality formula. The score is all electric-guitar riffs and cymbal crashes. The sound engineers occasionally insert some stock wildcat roaring and growling to augment the moaning of the wind, as if a hundred-mile-per-hour gale weren’t fearsome enough. The interteam tension is usually manufactured, a ginned-up horse race to spot the most and biggest tornadoes. Even Tim seems unable to resist the temptation to play to the cameras, at one point intoning ominously, “This could spell disaster!”
Aside from a few harmless dramatics, though, he refuses to lob snide sound bites at his so-called competitors or to indulge in intrateam sniping. Tim instructs the Iowa State students to behave professionally. “They’re going to create stories that do not exist because it’s a TV show,” he says, “and it has to be about catfighting. You guys will not talk about stuff if we’re having disagreements.”
For Carl, Storm Chasers is his biggest role since his fleeting appearance at the end of Against the Law. He gives himself over to the process with gusto, even going so far as to enroll in voice-acting lessons. The premiere is a major event for him and his father, Bob Young, and they follow the show religiously.
For much of the crew, the hovering cameras, the dumbed-down reality format, and the wholesale excision of the mesonets are little more than annoyances. They’ve borne them because TWISTEX can’t survive without Discovery. But gradually, minor grievances give way to legitimate problems. For starters, funding seems to arrive at the last minute every season, forcing Lee, Finley, and Tim to calibrate gear in the field or risk losing deployment opportunities. “Motel parking lots aren’t the ideal laboratories for installing new equipment,” Finley says.
Without fail, there’s always some component that isn’t ready. Tim’s TOWER deployment on the Bowdle, South Dakota, tornado last year, for example, could have yielded much more about the thermodynamic characteristics of the developing funnel. Unfortunately, TOWER couldn’t accurately record an essential metric—absolute pressure. In the rush to prepare for the season, Tim didn’t have time to install a dynamic pressure-reduction port. This would have allowed the barometer to measure something other than the pressure exerted on the sensor by the wind. Without the port, getting absolute pressure is akin to taking the temperature of a kitchen while holding a thermometer directly above the heated stovetop. “Every year we spent half of the season getting ready for the season,” Laubach says. “Fixing shit, working on shit, missing days, missing tornadoes.”
By 2011, TWISTEX’s third season on Storm Chasers, tardy funding isn’t their only gripe. The producers’ contrivances have become more and more brazen. “If they weren’t happy with a scene,” Grubb says, “they’d make us redo it. We were at their mercy.” The producers even try to feed Tim lines, according to Kathy and others. “He didn’t like that at all,” she says.
Worse are the expository after-action interviews, during which a member of the Discovery crew would pull Carl, Grzych, or Laubach aside and attempt to coax out criticisms of fellow teammates. Harmony, after all, doesn’t make for a good story line, while conflict breeds narrative. On national television, Carl declares more than once that Tim’s overcaution is costing them probe deployments.
But Carl, too, feels the team’s frustrations. In private conversation, he confides to a girlfriend, Melissa Daniels, that he feels manipulated, like a puppet being pulled about by its strings. One evening, they attend a concert in Carmel Valley, California, where the composer Philip Glass plays a piece from The Truman Show, a film about an insurance agent living in a small-town idyll, only to discover that he is the unwitting star of the world’s most popular reality television show. Carl tells Daniels he can relate.
More than sowing discord within the ranks of TWISTEX, the show runners have succeeded in drawing the team’s ire upon themselves. When Finley and Lee approach Tim’s truck to consult with him on a coming deployment, a producer attempts to hustle them away, grousing that they’re ruining the shot. Tim is apoplectic. “This is a science mission first,” he lectures. “Don’t you be shooing our people away.”
Laubach sees the pressure wearing on him. “I’d never seen Tim really, truly annoyed before. Like, I’m fucking over this thing.” The show and the mission to which Tim has dedicated his life feel increasingly at odds.
The event that epitomizes the growing gulf between research and reality television comes when the models indicate a potential outbreak in the southeastern United States in late April 2011. Despite Dixie Alley’s abundance of exceptionally powerful tornadoes, the Southeast is not a region in which TWISTEX customarily operates. The storms often course across the knotty landscape at up to highway speeds, turbocharged by a 150-mile-per-hour jet stream. If the screaming pace of the storms doesn’t make it difficult enough to keep up, the hills and trees render southeastern tornadoes nearly impossible to track. In such terrain, Tim would normally turn to radar for guidance. But wireless coverage is spotty at best; the backwoods can be a data black hole. And unlike the reliably gridded road networks of the plains, those in the Southeast lack any dependable coherence.
“There’s no point,” Lee says about chasing in the Southeast. “It’s just hills and forest. It’s bloody dangerous.” Even if they do manage to deploy on a tornado, the eddied turbulence shed by trees and hills would muddy up the data. By now, though, it has become clear that data collection is not the show’s primary concern. The producers call the shots, and today they want TWISTEX to go East.
Tim stifles whatever misgivings he has about venturing into Dixie Alley and drives east with Carl and Grzych. Grubb, Laubach, and Paul Samaras decide to come along for the ride, following behind in one of the mesonets. They’re all weighing the risks against the potentially historic significance of the outbreak. Lee and Finley decide to sit this one out.
* * *
On April 27, near Aliceville, Alabama, no one is getting any signal, and the last radar update is nearly thirty minutes stale. Even Tony Laubach, a mesonet driver renowned for his tolerance for hairy intercepts, is uncomfortable. “This is getting stupid,” he says.
The experience of chasing in the densely wooded Southeast feels alien to Tim. On the plains, there is little to obstruct his view apart from the occasional line of cottonwoods, or a low rise that will pass in a moment. In Kansas, there are places where, if you squint hard enough, it feels like you might be able to see clear to the rim of the world. But in Dixie, it’s like driving through a narrow hallway. The matchstick pines are close and impenetrable. Descending into the deep hollows, a chaser feels caged. Based on the last radar scan, they should be getting close to the track of a storm that’s been repeatedly producing tornadoes. But they have no way of knowing whether that track has deviated in the minutes since they lost cell service.
Suddenly, they spot a tornado lifting and reforming over the canopy. They can barely see the rest of it through the deep woods, but it must be coming back soon. Thirty seconds later, the vortex thrashes through the trees and spills into full view. It’s just 100 yards ahead of them, bursting forth like a thick plume of coal ash to the face.
They catch the thing on camera as it sweeps across the two-lane country road and plunges just as quickly back into the pines. No one argues when Grzych notes that only a few seconds of forward progress separated the probe truck from eternity. The gasp-inducing close call will turn out to be one of the most compelling moments of the season for Storm Chasers.
Later that day, near Pleasant Ridge, just west of Tuscaloosa, a violent wedge passes a mile and a half up the road, effectively ending their chase. Trees with trunks a foot wide, tangled with matrices of downed power lines, block their route. The odor of broken pine and hardwood is overpowering.
By the time they find the interstate, Birmingham and Tuscaloosa are disaster zones. Some sixty-five have been killed. The highways leading into and out of the cities are parking lots. Given the tornado’s path, Grubb believes they saw the monster responsible a short while
before it hit Tuscaloosa.
Over four days, some two hundred tornadoes kill 321 people in five states. Fifteen are extremely violent, rated EF4 to EF5. The outbreak is one of the deadliest in modern history, and TWISTEX is lucky to make it out safely. They’re wrung out and frustrated, both by the awful terrain they’d been sent into, and by their impotence in the face of such destruction—not a single probe landed, nor did they ever have a look at a viable intercept.
* * *
By the September 25 premiere of TWISTEX’s third season on the show, the series’ popularity—and its quality—have declined. As the first episode airs, Tim suspects Storm Chasers’ run has come to an end, and the ratings don’t improve as the season wears on.
The following January, Discovery announces the show’s cancellation. Though it means TWISTEX is once again without a sponsor, Tim greets the news with something like relief. The cameras have worn him down. The gray in his hair, a light dusting at his temples and sideburns in 2009, has since marched past his ears and down the nape of his neck. “I saw Tim age,” Kathy says, over the course of those years.
“If you knew him long enough,” Lee says, “you knew where his high-energy level normally was, and you could tell it wasn’t there.”
In early 2012, Tim phones Lee and Finley with the proposal they are all expecting: “How would you guys feel if we took this year off from official operations?” he asks. In truth, there really is no other option; everyone needs a break, and the money isn’t there. If funding hasn’t materialized by 2013, he suggests they start beating the bushes.
The Man Who Caught the Storm Page 18