Over the years, and most recently in Moore, he and his colleagues had noticed a dispiriting pattern during high-end tornado events. Some residents waited until the last moment and attempted to flee down the surface streets and highways. But by then it was usually too late. What they found was gridlock. People were dying in their cars.
Smith had decided to test a new strategy today. In the early afternoon, the Oklahoma Department of Transportation programmed its electronic highway signage to alert metro-area motorists to the coming storm, advising them to keep off the roads after 4:00 p.m. Though the official weather service policy is to recommend against driving in severe weather, today the office decided to urge residents who intend to evacuate to do so early, before the warnings are issued.
At times, it feels as though they are screaming into a void. How many will listen, and how many will die because they don’t? Smith has been in this business long enough to know that people don’t react to abstract threats. “Some of that is just human nature and how people respond to weather emergencies,” he says. “ ‘I’ve got to see it when I look out the window or hear my favorite TV meteorologist saying the same thing.’ ”
Given the timing of the storms, dinner will probably be out of the question, so Smith had left the office a little after noon to grab a bite while he still could. It was surreal, driving through town toward Chick-fil-A, seeing all these people going about their lives as if this were just another day. He wondered which ones were visiting from somewhere else. Did they know what was coming in a few short hours? Did they understand that a fuse had been lit? For warning forecasters, there’s a corrosive, low-grade anxiety to the wait. In the morning the office is abuzz with activity as the forecasters hustle to nail down the event, its location, time frame, and potential strength. After that, it gets quiet, even a little boring, which is another kind of stress. They’re waiting for a bomb to go off.
The rest of the morning and afternoon had passed uneventfully. Smith set his plan into motion, liaising with local emergency managers, broadcast-news, and transportation officials. Austin tended to his routine duties, issued the aviation forecast, and assisted with graphics for release through social media. The office typically launches two weather balloons every day, one at 5:00 a.m. and another at 5:00 p.m. But shortly before two that afternoon, a special weather balloon rose at about a thousand feet per minute above the National Weather Center, a sprawling, nine-story structure of brick, precast stone, metal paneling, and glass-curtain walls. As the balloon buffeted along switchbacking rivers of wind, the radio signals were received by the tracking antenna and transmitted to the forecast office. As expected, the moisture had deepened in the lower levels. The layer of warm, dry air, known as the capping inversion, continued to keep a lid on the unstable mass below. That wasn’t a good thing. The longer the lid remains, the longer these cubic miles of potential energy boil beneath a late-spring sun. It’s like a sealed-off and smoldering room, the heat building and building inside. Open a door or a window—break the cap—and the room explodes. Heat shimmer becomes fire; unstable air becomes the storm. Austin was confident the sky would find its release at some point. But the longer he waited, the more he worried. All he could do was monitor satellite and radar for the first congealing cloud mass, the first echo.
By now, at about 4:00 p.m., they know it won’t be long. The signal has arrived. The winds have finally backed. Visible satellite tells the story. For much of the afternoon, thin bands of cumuliform clouds had striped central Oklahoma like fish scales. Now they begin to coalesce into thick, lumpy braids, the towering cumulus throwing a distinctive shade onto the plains below. It’s like watching the rapid growth of bacteria in a petri dish. Along the cold front and the dry line, which halves the state and trails into eastern Kansas, a string of storm anvils begins to swell, first in the far northeast of Oklahoma, now working its way down to the southwest.
The first radar echo—a storm tall enough to catch the radar beam—comes from Kay County, on the Kansas line. More follow like catching fire. By 4:46 p.m., Smith’s office issues severe-thunderstorm warnings for Custer, Kingfisher, Caddo, Washita, Blaine, and Canadian Counties. The pace of storm growth is startling—a few puffy cumulus clouds have become thunderstorms with tops rising more than 50,000 feet into the atmosphere. “Think about a cloud potentially ten miles in height that wasn’t there fifteen or thirty minutes ago. You can’t really see that at the ground, but some of these updrafts are well over one hundred miles per hour. Things are going on in the atmosphere in such a short amount of time that it’s hard to wrap your mind around,” Smith says.
At 5:19, Austin observes the first evidence of a hook echo on radar in southern Canadian County. This does not necessarily mean a tornado is on the ground. But it means that the storm is beginning to organize, to rotate, and to wrap itself in precipitation. He is looking for evidence of continuity in movement, from the upper levels of the storm down as far as the radar’s beam will reach. The sign he is searching for is convergent winds near the surface.
The forecasters glance up at the bank of flatscreens, where local news stations display live feeds from helicopters with eyes on the storm. They look for the shape of the wall cloud. Austin glances back down at the radar screen. He’s searching for evidence that the precipitation detected by radar is moving in different directions in close proximity. That means rotation. If he sees a ball of precipitation at low elevations that’s red on one side and green on the other, that’s the signal.
At about 5:35 p.m., he spots it—clear evidence of tornadic rotation. Shortly thereafter, the forecast office issues the evening’s first tornado warning.
“It’s strange,” Smith says. “Once the storms get going and you begin to see what may happen in more concrete detail, there’s this feeling. You never quit trying to put information out, but at some point if you haven’t done something by now—if you live in a mobile home and you haven’t driven to a shelter by now—it may be too late.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
* * *
EL RENO, OKLAHOMA
A WHITE CHEVY Cobalt pulls off to the side of Calumet Road, just south of the on- and off-ramps to Interstate 40, on an isolated stretch west of Oklahoma City. Behind the wheel, Carl Young films and shoots still photographs with a DSLR camera. Tim Samaras is in the front passenger seat next to him, and his son Paul sits in the rear. They peer through the windows to the southwestern sky at a mammoth Oklahoma supercell. It looks every bit as though it intends to pick up the deadly trail scythed through Moore eleven days before. This is a high-precipitation superstorm, characterized by sheer enormity and power rather than clean lines and discrete, graceful funnels. Its troposphere-piercing anvil looms nearly twice the height of K2. The mesocyclone and the wall cloud beneath spin low and close to an antenna tower’s warning lights, darkening miles of prairie.
The wait can be enervating, especially when a chaser suspects what’s coming. There’s a helplessness in this foreknowledge. He can only keep his vigil, torn between two competing hopes: that a man who has seen so much will see something new today, and that when the tornado finally comes, no one dies. This close to Oklahoma City, though, he may be asking for too much.
The dire language out of the Storm Prediction Center is almost unprecedented. The latest sounding has been described as a “loaded-gun profile.” CAPE values of instability are consistent with the highest ever recorded by the National Weather Center this time of year. The Bowdle, South Dakota, tornado of 2010 is likely the most powerful Tim has ever personally witnessed. Its CAPE values had maxed out just shy of 5,000 joules per kilogram. The values this afternoon are astonishing, rising in excess of 5,000 to 5,500 joules per kilogram.
On any other day, Tim would be his usual conscientious self, ever mindful of obligations. Lightning should be his primary mission right now. But he seems to have resigned himself to missing out on the most promising electrical display so far this season. At nearly six in the evening, it is unlikely he will mak
e it back to Alva to collect the LIV in time. He’ll pass on the once-in-a-season electrical event for a supercell setup that may never repeat in his lifetime. He’s a tornado hunter at heart.
The mystery of what form will emerge from the storm is essential to the anxious wait. How does one patiently pass the time when, as a friend of Tim’s once put it, you’re waiting to see “the hand of God”? The coming cataclysm could resemble the awful thing that swept out of the pine curtain like a haze of coal ash in Dixie Alley two years before. It could look like the broad wedges of Manchester or Bowdle. Or it could look like no tornado he’s ever seen.
Aside from their proximity to an urban center, this chase won’t be as bad as Dixie Alley. Tim must take note of the country roads, which are laid out in a grid, albeit an uneven one. The prairie is largely level, apart from some low hills. Scattered over the green terraced ridges are oil-well-pad sites on graded squares of yellow-red gravel and sandy loam. The wheat and hay country is seamed with hackberry- and oak-lined draws. There are gullies that bleed into freshets, freshets that merge into creeks, and creeks that branch toward the kinked trunk of the Canadian River—the only real natural barrier they might have to contend with.
Setting up on the southern cell is the obvious call, and it should be clear by now to Tim, Carl, and Paul that they are tracking the right storm. The sun isn’t due to set for another few hours, but here, under the spreading anvil of the cumulonimbus, dusk is coming on fast.
At 5:41 p.m., Carl pulls back onto Calumet Road and drives south in no particular hurry. Excited chatter fills the cab. The distended wall cloud pulses with life. It’s a cocoon in pupation, promising the emergence of another life-form entirely. After less than a mile and a half, faded asphalt transitions into gravel, and the circulation from their vantage becomes rain wrapped. In all likelihood, Tim and Carl have decided that by taking the first east road they come to, they can get out ahead of the rain and improve their sight lines.
Over the next twenty minutes they cover roughly three miles. At this leisurely rate, they probably stop to take pictures. Paul may be filming the evolving mesocyclone. Tim and Carl likely discuss chase strategy and the indicators of storm development. Smith Road is a straight shot east, across humped ridges and shallow creek bottoms, past the ivory spires of natural-gas-condensate towers and tank batteries. After a couple of miles, they leave the erosive cuts of the river valley, and the country before them levels out. The trees thin and give way to flat-topped blond wheat ready for the combine. The first cloud-to-ground strokes luminesce through deepening slugs of precipitation. It won’t be long now.
At 6:00 p.m., still traveling east, Carl begins to film again at the intersection of Smith and Heaston Road. He holds a camera in one hand and the wheel in the other. Tim’s face appears in profile, with that unmistakably hawkish nose and thick-framed glasses. He is staring toward the south, down Heaston, the storm no more than a mile and a half distant.
Ashen braids of cloud race over the prairie from north to south, looking low enough to touch in places. If this entire circulation pool comes down—if its size is any indication of what’s to come—this is going to be quite a chase. Tim knows the chrysalis of a legendary monster when he sees one. “Oh, my God,” he says. “This is going to be a huge wedge.”
Events will soon move quickly, and they won’t slow until the end. The last few moments before a killer tornado touches down are like the breath drawn before the plunge. The beginnings of the funnel are often beautiful and evocative—a flaring and bunching of cloud material, like the dance of a murmuration of starlings across the sky. But all is moving at a faster speed this afternoon.
Within seconds of the first wisps, there is a tornado on the ground, a broad cone out of which thin vortices lash and spear the prairie. A few rapid strokes of the Cobalt’s windshield wipers pass, and a series of oscillations are transmitted along the length of the funnel. It quadruples in width. The growth is so sudden it can seem as though a distortion is at work, a visual artifact produced by a lens. But it should serve as a reminder that what they chase isn’t bound to some visible spectra. It’s the closest thing to a ghost in the physical world. “Wow,” Carl exclaims. “My God . . . Look at the tornado! Just to our south.”
They continue east, driving forty and fifty miles per hour as the sedan shudders over the washboard dirt road. Tim and Carl would expect the tornado to close in on them gradually, taking a diagonal northeast track that would place it on a collision course with El Reno. Instead, it seems to be receding, falling away ever farther to their southwest. Smith Road is no longer a viable intercept route. It is time to readjust and close the distance. At about 6:06 p.m., the Cobalt slows and turns south down Brandley Road.
The shape on the southwestern horizon is alien, otherworldly, a plume of smoke that lives and breathes, swirling of its own accord.
“It’s heading straight for Oklahoma City,” Tim says.
They continue south for a mile, but Tim prefers to operate with a buffer, and if his choice to turn at the next intersection is any indication, he’s sensing that theirs grows threadbare. Turning east on Jensen Road means caution, safety.
Yet with each moment they drive eastward, the tornado veers farther out of range, a behavior they must find bafflingly aberrant. Most mature twisters follow the parent storm and the prevailing winds from the southwest to the northeast. This one is clearly tracking to the southeast. The ideal intercept strategy would be to stay north, get ahead, drop down a little south if need be, and deploy. They’re in perfect position for a conventional, northeastbound tornado. But this is clearly not a conventional tornado. Today, they’re barely keeping up.
Regaining their edge will require some white-knuckle maneuvering. They’ll have to take the next south road and push close enough to keep the tornado in range, but not too close. There’s another east road about a mile down, which should keep them clear of the outer circulation.
Just before 6:09, Tim, Carl, and Paul make their move. Carl steers the Cobalt south down Chiles Road in an attempt to close the increasing distance. But the nearer they get to their east route, the clearer their mistake becomes.
For roughly forty seconds, the car remains unusually quiet. Carl is the first to break the silence. “Is the airport down another mile?” he asks, though he already knows the answer.
Reuter Road, the planned east turn, is a dead end. For the most part, the road network is laid out in a reliable square-mile grid. Not so with Reuter, which terminates at the El Reno Regional Airport. This means Tim, Carl, and Paul are now committed to driving an additional mile to the south—much closer to the tornado than they would prefer.
By 6:10, as they pass Reuter, they are no more than a mile and a half from the outer edge of the condensation funnel. Carl stammers about spotting Reed Timmer, their former Storm Chasers costar, perhaps in an attempt to make himself and the others feel as though their position isn’t quite so precarious. There are only two options available to them at the moment, and neither is appealing. They can turn around and backtrack to Jensen Road, then continue east; this will almost certainly knock them off course and preclude an intercept. Or, they can grit their teeth and continue south, courting the storm’s northern flank as they make for the next east road, called Reno.
Tim and Carl choose to press on. At about the same time, the tornado’s south-southeast track shifts. It is now moving almost due east. From their perspective, they would notice that the tornado is no longer off to their two o’clock—instead, it is directly ahead of them, sitting over Chiles Road, a sooty parabola the width of some eight football fields. They’re still in the chase, but as it stands, they’re being outmaneuvered.
* * *
At 6:04 p.m., and a little over three miles to the east of the Cobalt, Howie Bluestein and two graduate research assistants set up on a rise at the southern outskirts of El Reno. Nearby, his RaXPol mobile radar generator thrums as the antenna revolves atop its flatbed pedestal. Sun-cured wheat spikes sough
and toss in the tremulous fields to the west, where the wind whips the crops into hypnotic waves. But Bluestein and his assistants are focused on a sight farther out.
Just south of due west, the storm’s lowest level is hidden behind the gentle swells of the intervening miles, yet there is no mistaking the vertiginous plunge of the cloud line. “I’d say that’s a tornado,” says Jeff Snyder, a lanky Minnesotan and research scientist. The broad cone vortex is the color of blue gunmetal, and the cloud motion is startlingly energetic. The storm is gathering strength. The scientists can practically sense the velocities it is preparing to unleash.
Bluestein gives Snyder an instruction, though it is difficult to hear over the generator. “Do you want me to do tornado mode?” Snyder shouts, in reference to the antenna setting that would focus the radar beam closer to ground level.
“No, not yet,” Bluestein replies. He notes that the tornado is still too far out, five to six miles away. Better for now to maintain a broader scan.
“I’m only doing seventy-five-meter range gates instead of thirty.”
“Okay. How long will it take you to do thirty?”
“For me to get reset up, it’s gonna be down for twenty to thirty seconds.”
Bluestein can’t afford to have RaXPol off-line, not with an intensifying tornado in progress. “Let it go,” he says.
As the minutes pass, however, it becomes apparent the tornado is tracking to the east or southeast rather than to the northeast. This is a propitious development for the town of El Reno. But for the researchers, it means they will soon need to reposition. With the sun slipping down toward the western horizon, the once-crisp contrast fades into a brume of rain.
“Do you see it in there?” Snyder asks. Wind presses at his back, drawn into the storm as though its pull is gravitational. “This inflow is something else.”
The Man Who Caught the Storm Page 21