The contrast against the dull pewter sky is poor, but they can just make out the thin outline. Finally, they clear the trees obstructing their view and see the sky swarming with dark objects—brush, limbs, trunks hurtling end over end. The tornado is moving toward the road at an oblique angle, shearing through a stand of bur oak no more than a couple hundred yards off. They watch pieces of the trees lift, hover for a moment, and fall back to earth. Leaves and twigs drift onto the truck’s rough Line-X coating like confetti. It’s a sign they’re far too close.
After the tornado dissipates, and the chase ends, Carl announces, “Wow! That was pretty exciting.”
Tim, however, is brooding over the deadly course the day might have taken. In all likelihood, Paul’s presence inclines him further toward caution. In previous seasons, Paul had typically followed at a safe remove in one of the mesonet cars. With Discovery Channel cameramen in the truck, there simply hadn’t been enough room for him. But now he rides with Tim, and Kathy’s words of warning still resound in her husband’s ears. In the background of video footage taken by Paul, Tim is candid with Carl: “I didn’t mean to get nasty, but if you get alongside it during the rope-out stage, we can get in a lot of trouble. I wasn’t comfortable with it.”
Carl’s response is odd. Either he hasn’t understood, or he is deflecting Tim’s aggravation. He replies nonchalantly, “No worries.”
After that, neither of them speaks for a while.
Any grievance must seem trivial later that afternoon when they hear about what happened in Moore, a suburb south of Oklahoma City. At the time, they had known only what they saw on radar: a nightmare velocity couplet over a densely populated city. As they drive south into Texas, the consequence of that radar signature reveals itself. Everyone in the car is glued either to a smartphone or a laptop. Two elementary schools, they learn, have been destroyed, and seven children are dead. The death toll has risen to twenty-four in all. More than 1,200 structures—houses, businesses, hospitals—will have to be torn down.
The tornado took a path through town that is eerily similar to the one sampled by Josh Wurman in 1999. Because even well-anchored homes have been swept from their foundations, the National Weather Service bestows an EF5 rating. While its forecasters had been clear about the potential for “strong tornadoes” today, what happened in Moore was no foregone conclusion. Most chasers—and forecasters—had thought the big show would take place farther south, around where Tim, Carl, and Paul were chasing. But something unforeseen transformed the supercell heading for Moore: a chance encounter produced a lethal outcome.
It was only after merging with another decaying thunderstorm that the Moore supercell kicked into overdrive and began cutting a trail of EF4 and EF5 damage. The question on every scientist’s mind now is whether the merger touched off the storm’s drastic intensification. And if it did, how could such a unique and seemingly random series of events be predicted?
Once again, the storm has shown mankind—Tim Samaras included—that there is still much to learn. The message from the sky today hadn’t screamed killer tornado. But a middling storm just happened to collide with another thundershower’s outflow surge, and now twenty-four are dead.
That night, the crew busts on a storm near Wichita Falls, Texas, then works its way east to book rooms at a motel in Sherman, just south of the Red River. The next day, they pass through Dallas, heading southeast after a possible target. Along the way, they see plenty of rain and hail, but no tornadoes. The following morning, May 22, they begin the long journey back to Colorado. Tim, Carl, and Paul need to prepare the LIV for the lightning project, which will kick off in a few days. Grubb won’t join them for the next chase; he doesn’t want to miss his daughter’s birthday.
They drive north up Interstate 35, through Texas and into Oklahoma—a route that will take them right through the middle of Moore. By the time they pass Robinson Avenue and enter the damage path, traffic has slowed to a crawl. It is quiet inside the truck. Paul angles his camera out the window and shoots video; Carl snaps photographs.
They see trees that have been filed down to bare trunks, hung with metal and plastic. The mud-blasted vehicles piled along the highway look as though they’ve come from a scrap yard. As they pass through a neighborhood, the rows of houses stop all of a sudden. There is nothing on the ground but debris-strewn slabs and driveways that lead nowhere. After a few hundred yards, the houses begin again, practically pristine.
On the other side of the highway, they are stunned by the damage to the Moore Medical Center, an ostensibly well-engineered structure made of precast concrete and reinforcing steel. Even from I-35, they can see that the building’s envelope has been stripped away where it faced the tornado. Part of its roof system has been peeled open. If they could have gotten closer, they would have noticed that a large metal Dumpster has come to rest atop the building. TWISTEX’s resident EMT, Ben McMillan, had been present at the scene, helping pull people from a collapsed office building nearby as the tornado receded in the distance.
As often as those in the truck have had to pull up to a town reduced to rubble, the sight never fails to induce a profound melancholy. This is the storm chaser’s moral conundrum: they come to see the fastest wind on the planet, but they know full well it may fall like the sword of Damocles on people’s lives, homes, entire towns. Every chaser responds differently. If they believe in God, they pray for the dead and the living. If they’re engineers, they may filter the destruction through the measurable: structural anchoring (or the lack thereof), debris impacts, and the cold calculus of wind loading. Some chasers dive headlong into the wreckage if first responders haven’t yet arrived, the role of watcher subsumed by duty as a human.
These days will tear open anyone’s world. They’ve often motivated Tim to push harder, to gather the kind of data that would have allowed even one more soul to survive. If the death sweeping past his window has such an effect today, he keeps it inside. No one in the truck is saying much now.
By the time they reach the end of the damage path, traffic begins to pick up again. They drive through the night and arrive in Bennett in the early-morning hours of May 23. Tim has a brief window—a few days at most—to ready himself for a different kind of chase. This isn’t like loading the probe truck with a mesonet rack, a TOWER, and bunch of turtles. He’ll be hauling into the field the most advanced mobile lightning observatory ever built. Not only must he double-check the camera systems and ready the box truck for a long haul, he’s got laundry to do and another suitcase to pack. Since the interlude will be short, Carl stays on in the guest bedroom.
He’s a good guest all around. Carl cooks like a gourmand and always insists on doing the dishes afterward. He is unfailingly kind to Paul and just as obsessed with movies. In the afternoons, they usually abscond into town and see the latest films, especially science fiction. This is one of the upsides of Tim’s chasing, and what Kathy enjoys most: getting to know kids from a school in the Iowa farm country, or a guy from Lake Tahoe whom she might otherwise never have met without the passion that connects him to her husband.
But on May 26, there’s no time to linger. The house is a flurry of activity. Tim is always a little stressed on the day of a mission. He wakes early and brews a pot of coffee. Periodically, he and Carl huddle over a laptop and discuss the weather models’ various predictions. They intend to head out today and reach central Kansas by nightfall. He and Carl haul camera equipment out to the LIV and fill coolers with drinks and snacks.
When all is ready, Tim pulls around to the front of the house with a Chevy Cobalt, which he plans to use as a secondary chase vehicle, just in case they decide to go after a tornado. In addition to the funding he’s receiving through PhOCAL, the National Geographic Society is underwriting his study of lightning and tornadoes inside plains “superstorms.” To that end, Tim stows three probes in the sedan’s trunk. Normally, he’d never attempt a deployment in one of the Cobalts, but with limited funding, Tim must save where he can—and
the probe truck guzzles diesel.
At around noon, he kisses Kathy good-bye. He and Paul step into the LIV, and Carl mans the Cobalt. They pull down the long drive, and through the gate. The white van and the mesonet car turn north, heading toward the interstate. With the Bennett house’s broad vistas, one can watch the vehicles recede into the distance until they are tiny specks. Eventually, they disappear from view.
Their farewell is a moment Kathy will remember. This is the last time she will see her husband and son alive.
* * *
Throughout the next week, Tim and his companions chase during the daylight hours and document lightning by night. The schedule makes for some exceptionally long days. “You’re sleeping or you’re working,” says Walt Lyons, Tim’s project partner. “These are twelve- to eighteen-hour shifts. It’s not unusual for field campaigns to burn the candle at both ends. You’re at the mercy of the storm.”
On May 29, they settle around Salina, Kansas, as a staging ground for Tim’s PhOCAL mission. That night, the many eyes of the LIV are fixed on a field of wind turbines like ancient cenotaphs in the strobing light. Reaching 12,000 frames per second, Tim’s Phantom cameras slow the world down to an almost unfathomable timescale. An incandescent filament erupts from the top of the turbine, bisects itself, and blooms outward in delicate, arcing points of Day-Glo light. It all happens within microseconds, captured for the first time by the LIV.
By the thirtieth, the storms in central Kansas are withering. The men head south to Oklahoma. On a country road east of Guthrie, Tim and the guys are parked at the dirt entrance of a pasture gate, when a familiar crew pulls up behind them. Bruce Lee and Cathy Finley are out chasing for the pure enjoyment of it—no mesonets, no grad students. They’d seen Tim’s Cobalt earlier in the week, and they’re eager to reconnect now.
Carl stands on the side of the road, watching weakening storms move east. “We killed it,” he calls out to Lee and Finley, referring to the day’s guttering tornado potential.
“I thought we killed it.” Finley laughs.
They set to swapping post-op reports on a fairly uneventful afternoon. Lee and Finley had seen a brief tornado. Tim, Carl, and Paul had busted. Finley shows Carl some shots she’d taken of an EF4 in Kansas two days earlier. He’s distraught; the lightning project had forced them to miss the storm. Talk now turns to TWISTEX. Tim has scraped together enough money for a limited mission in June, just to test and calibrate equipment. Lee and Finley have updated the mesonets, and Tim is currently developing the next-generation TOWER. It isn’t ready just yet, but he should have more time to work on the device as soon as the lightning project wraps up for the year.
They all lean against their cars and gaze out across the low hills and the post oaks. The sun is setting, and the rear flank of the storm is ablaze with its deep vermilion light. It feels like old times for a moment. But soon, Tim has to head back north. He left the LIV in Kansas to chase tornadoes in the Chevy Cobalt, and he needs to retrieve the rig.
In all likelihood, they’ll be back down here tomorrow. The signs are pointing to a significant event in central Oklahoma. Lee and Finley are heading back to Minnesota, though; they’re loath to chase storms near cities. They wish the boys happy hunting and begin to walk to their car. Dusk is coming on.
Carl calls after them, “See you in June.”
* * *
Later in the evening, Lyons and Tim coordinate tomorrow’s LIV deployment over the phone. Unfortunately, the best vantage point from which to observe transient luminous events will be somewhere to the north, far from the supercell action. If Tim chases tornadoes in central Oklahoma in the day, he’ll be cutting it close. “If you go somewhere around Woodward,” Lyons says, “get set up by sunset. This will be an early event. As soon as it’s dark, I want you to be rolling.”
The next morning, Tim steers south out of Kansas toward Oklahoma. Lyons speaks with him again at around 11:00 a.m., and by all indications he is bound for the planned destination. But along the way the three stop off in Alva, some sixty-five miles northeast of Woodward, and park the LIV in a lot near the Woods County Courthouse.
Eleven days after the horror in Moore, it has become evident that the Oklahoma City area is in for another hard day. Tim and Carl are astute forecasters. Apart from the environmental indicators that practically scream EF5 to even the newbie chaser, they would have noticed the oppressive air, sopping with moisture and heavy with heat. It feels like a historic storm day. The pent-up energy is tangible, visible.
Tim and Carl, storm junkies that they are, can’t resist. They don’t want to sit on the sidelines as they did at Moore. They decide to leave the LIV in the courthouse parking lot and drive south to intercept the storm. “Lightning by night, and tornadoes by day, was the way he had it set up,” Lyons says. “I’m sure his intent was to be back in Woodward by the time it was dark.”
He wouldn’t leave the LIV some 130 miles to the north just to chase any old storm. Something epic is coming to the oil and cattle country west of Oklahoma City. The turtles are stowed in the trunk for just such an occasion, and Tim won’t miss the big show.
CHAPTER TWENTY
* * *
A SHIFT IN THE WIND
AT AROUND FOUR that afternoon, the mesonet stations in the counties west of Oklahoma City begin to register the change Rick Smith has been dreading all day. The omen isn’t anything as dramatic as a bloodred sunrise or a morning darkened by coagulating clouds. So subtle is the shift that those residing in Canadian and Caddo Counties are unlikely to notice it at all.
What troubles Smith, the warning-coordination meteorologist at the National Weather Center in Norman, is that the wind out of the south-southwest has deviated thirty degrees: and it’s now coursing in from the southeast. This means that the dry line has advanced toward the metro area. Air masses from different directions are now converging.
Smith had hoped beyond reason that at least one of the pieces would fail to fall into place today. But the winds are “backing” now, summoning up the low-level convergence required for tornadoes. Events have been set in motion.
Here we go, he says to himself.
* * *
Smith had sensed the storm potential as soon as he stepped outside this morning. A miasmal haze dimmed the sky. The air felt syrupy. A native Tennessean and twenty-year veteran of the weather service, Smith made sure the tornado shelter in his garage was unlocked. He cleared the spiderwebs out and checked the batteries on the flashlights and weather radio. He gave his family a strict curfew: be home no later than 4:00 p.m.
By 9:00 a.m., he arrived at the National Weather Center, located at the southern edge of the University of Oklahoma. He made his way to the forecast office on the second floor, passing a cluster of desks arranged in a horseshoe pattern, and wall-to-wall windows with a view to the western sky. Each desk was crowded with as many as three monitors, displaying feeds from visible satellite and radar; the projections of short- and long-range computer models; and the office’s various social media accounts, from which advisories are disseminated to the public. At the front of the room, a bank of flatscreen televisions was tuned to the local news.
Smith’s first task was to convene the “morning huddle,” briefing an already wrung-out crew on the day’s dreadful possibility. They had all been pulling long shifts, issuing forecasts and warnings they hoped the people of Oklahoma would heed. They had watched in real time on May 20 as the radar signature over Moore killed neighbors in primary shades of red, green, and blue. The tornado passed within four miles of Smith’s home and his family.
Among the forecasters on duty was Marc Austin, the chaser who’d celebrated the Rozel tornado at the Comfort Suites with Carl and Paul no more than two weeks ago. That glimmer of chase nirvana was already fully eclipsed, though. Yesterday, Austin had worked a nerve-racking twelve-hour shift on a severe-weather threat that had fizzled at the last moment. He was exhausted.
The winds hadn’t backed yesterday. But by the morning of
May 31, few of the forecasters believed the luck would hold.
In the huddle, Austin described the instability as “maxed out.” Once storms began to ignite along the dry line, they would go tornadic in a hurry, provided there was wind shear at lower levels. Without shear near the ground—without those backing winds—no vortex would be possible.
Tornadoes don’t thrive on unidirectional harmony. They feed on convergence, on collision and opposition. This requires a spiral staircase of diverging wind vectors—a pathway for vorticity. It starts with a southeasterly wind near the surface, shifting southwesterly the higher it goes, and finally westerly once it hits the jet stream several miles up. As of this morning, one puzzle piece was missing. But Smith and Austin knew the winds would likely back to the southeast as the day wore on.
If their worst fears are realized, and this storm is as bad as they think it will be, the event should begin west of Oklahoma City and work its way east, reaching peak intensity during rush hour. That would mean the storm should mature by the time it enters the metro area on a day when softball teams from all over the country are arriving at the ASA Hall of Fame Stadium for the Women’s College World Series. Hundreds of relief workers from the Red Cross and other agencies are still assisting with the recovery effort in Moore.
The question before the morning huddle was how to convey the gravity of this day to a populace still traumatized by the Moore tornado without inciting panic. “Are we going to break the glass and pull out the scary words?” Smith had asked. He knew what central Oklahoma had already been through this month. “That’s all they’ve seen on the news: tornado damage, tornado debris. Pictures and video of funerals for the deceased. There was a saturation of information and a palpable sense of dread in the community.”
The Man Who Caught the Storm Page 20