The Man Who Caught the Storm

by Brantley Hargrove

  US 81 disappears some 400 yards to the south, as if it has terminated at the foot of a sheer crag, rising above the highway with neither grade nor foothill. It swallows the horizon for more than two miles in either direction. If their eyes could penetrate the shadow and rain and dust, they would see vehicles tumbling.

  Turning south is obviously out of the question. And with the tornado moving off rapidly to the east—or is it the northeast again?—heading north would mean placing themselves hopelessly out of position for the intercept.

  “So, this is the highway. . . .” Tim begins.

  “Yeah.”

  “We’re just gonna have to . . .”

  “Keep on going,” Carl finishes Tim’s thought.

  Disagree as they have in the past, this time Tim and Carl are in perfect accord about their next move. They are not giving up on the storm of their lives. To stay in the game, they must keep going east. The Cobalt crosses the highway’s four empty lanes and picks up the dirt road on the other side.

  * * *

  Due south of the intersection, Mike Bettes, an on-camera meteorologist at the Weather Channel, adjusts his earpiece for the live shot. At 6:14 p.m., he’s standing near the southbound lane of US 81. The mile-wide darkness is still west of the highway, and the light around him, refracted through an apricot sunset and deep blue rain, looks stained, like stagnant water steeped with the tannins of leaves. Bettes wears a bright blue TWC Windbreaker and a ball cap covering short blond hair. “Guys, that’s it,” he shouts. “Right there! There’s the tornado. We are just north of Union City, south of El Reno, south of I-40. Cops have blocked off 81 at this point. They’re not letting traffic go southbound because the tornado could go right over top of Union City, or pass very close to it.

  “Look at that monster. This is a huge tornado. If you live in Union City, south of El Reno, you have to take shelter now! There is no more time to waste. The movement on this is going to be almost due east.”

  The satellite feed deteriorates for a moment, and the audio cuts out, but Bettes is describing the wrapping rains, his hand swooping and cutting illustratively. “We are probably roughly a mile away from it right now, and it’s absolutely enormous! There is no time to waste. Right now you have to get to your shelter as quickly as possible.

  “This thing is moving relatively slowly,” Bettes says, addressing his crew as much as the live viewing audience. “What we may end up doing, guys—because we could be putting ourselves in a dangerous position here—we may actually quickly try to get into our cars and get south of here. That’d be the safest place to do that. I think we have to go now in order to stay ahead of this and not get run over by it.”

  At 6:16, the men pile into a satellite truck and two GMC Yukon XL SUVs. Bettes rides in the front passenger seat of the second GMC in the convoy, and Austin Anderson, a field producer from Texas, jumps behind the wheel. They pull onto US 81 and dash south, trying to cut ahead of the eastbound tornado. Without realizing it, by 6:19 they have penetrated its weak northern flank. Bettes was wrong; Tim, Carl, and Paul aren’t the only chasers who have misjudged both its speed and its size. The blinding rain is the first sign the convoy is in trouble. The light through the windows fades and the sky darkens.

  Cameraman Brad Reynolds rolls the window down and trains his lens just ahead and to his right. The trees lining the road lean north; limbs flagellate in the current. Then the line of trees ends and they get a clear view.

  The tornado is just off the road, almost directly to the right and coming for them. In one second the subvortex is an opaque stovepipe. In the next, it breaks down and disperses into two, then three, and as many as four suction vortices, like geysers of pure vertical motion.

  “Oh, shit,” Bettes mutters. “Oh, shit.”

  We gotta get out of here, Anderson thinks. We’ve got to get past them before they hit us.

  The road in front of them vanishes. “Hold on, brothers,” Bettes shouts. “Hold on.”

  Reynolds rolls his window up, and the camera sees little through the tint but the red smear of passing brake lights.

  “Everybody, duck. Go-go-go-go. Just keep it going if you can. Everybody, duck down.”

  Reynolds’s window shatters.

  There is the rushing sound of wind, a wall of white noise, and Anderson experiences a peculiar floating sensation.

  Then, the SUV comes down hard and his memory goes dark.

  When he comes to, Anderson’s head is bouncing against the earth through the broken window each time the SUV rolls onto his side of the cab. Reynolds’s camera picks up a confusion of tumbling and the grunts elicited by the impact of bodies against hard interior paneling. Then the camera is ejected from the car. The image is blurred, but the SUV can be seen rolling over and over, receding from view.

  When the GMC finally comes to rest, on its tires, the wind surges through the cab and Anderson spits the gravel and soil from his mouth. Bettes shouts out to his team. He and Reynolds climb out and try to pry open Anderson’s door, but it won’t budge. They extract him instead through the other side. Anderson stands up and feels sharp swells of pain in his ribs with every breath. Though the adrenaline partially inures him to the extent of his injuries, he’s cracked his sternum, crushed several vertebrosternal ribs, and fractured a vertebra in his neck.

  The men look at the SUV. It has been dismantled—its luridly decaled windows shattered, side-impact air bags protuberant, the roof over the front seat nearly flush with the hood. They had been traveling south down US 81 and now find themselves in a field east of the northbound side. The SUV traveled across the broad median, then across two more highway lanes—a distance of some 200 yards. Others begin to emerge from overturned cars and trucks nearby. Two men, a volunteer school bus driver and an oil-field hand, had been hit roughly a mile to the southwest, a minute before the subvortex overtook the Weather Channel SUV. The bus driver, Billy O’Neal, is already dead. Dustin Heath Bridges, the oil-field worker, soon succumbs to his injuries.

  Anderson can see the trailing edge of the tornado some 150 yards out. It’s more than two miles wide now and heading northeast.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  * * *

  THE LAST RIDE

  CARL RACES ACROSS the four lanes of US 81 and plows into the hanging traces of grit that billow behind the Toyota Yaris in front. The trees thin and the red-bed plains slope gently before them. Carl’s outlook brightens. The rain is easing and the road ahead appears dry.

  It has cleared up enough that if they glance out Tim’s window just after 6:20 p.m., they will sight the thin annulus and sod corona of a satellite vortex, no more than 250 yards distant.

  After only eight seconds, though, it is ingested by what can only be described as an encroaching wall. Confusion begins to grip the men in the Cobalt. They have been flying down country roads at nearly fifty miles per hour, and they can’t seem to gain an inch. Tim suspects the tornado is racing at forty miles per hour at least.

  If Tim consults the latest radar scan from the nearest stationary Doppler, updated a minute before, he will note that it places the tornado core signature two miles to his southwest. But at this proximity he is likely chasing by sight alone. And this is just as well, because the radar is misleading. Much has changed in the last sixty seconds.

  The tornado is steadily swallowing the distance. Just as the Cobalt passed US 81, the twister jagged to the northeast, even more severely than when they’d skirted the circulation just minutes ago. It isn’t only that it’s turning toward them, now; the tornado is expanding. It’s growing toward them. They’re not, as they’d thought, comfortably ahead; they’re on the knife’s edge.

  Some thirty seconds later, the rain begins to fall with such ferocity that their windshield wipers can’t clear the water. The world around them closes in. Visibility is reduced to mere tens of yards.

  Their grip on the increasingly sodden road is deteriorating, and a seventy-mile-per-hour headwind out of the northeast further slows their pro
gress. Given the amount of ground they have covered, Carl is still maintaining a quick pace despite the conditions, at least forty to fifty miles per hour.

  Their eyes strain to the south, searching.

  “Now I see it,” Carl says, “well, maybe I don’t.”

  “It’s like it’s just a bunch of rain here,” Tim ventures.

  Then, for the first time, he must begin to understand. There is no way of knowing exactly what Tim sees in the south, but the timbre of his voice shifts. It isn’t panic so much as a dawning comprehension: The tornado isn’t gone; it’s just enormous.

  “In fact, uh, keep going. This is a very bad spot.”

  With that, Carl’s DSLR camera goes silent, having reached the capacity of its five-gigabyte storage disk.

  The camera pointing out the rear window of storm chaser Dan Robinson’s Toyota Yaris picks up where the audio recording leaves off.

  From the moment the Cobalt crosses Highway 81, it is losing ground. The tornado sprints across the fields, its inflow battering the sedan. While Robinson pulls away from the gathering shadow, the darkness fastens itself to Tim, Carl, and Paul. The Chevy’s headlights dim and flare with the passing of intervening rain curtains, winking from view behind the gentle heave and fall of the prairie. Within a minute, beneath the lowering vault of tungsten-colored cloud, the headlights dwindle to a single, small point of light.

  The Cobalt is now experiencing headwinds upward of 110 miles per hour. Its four cylinders are not equal to the task of hauling three grown men and three steel probes over a muddy road. They can manage no more than twenty to thirty miles per hour.

  As the distance between Robinson’s camera and the storm grows, a dark wall fills the left edge of the frame. The vault lifts and the subvortex that has haunted the Cobalt’s trail since Reformatory Road now reveals itself. You’d have to catch it between the distortions of sheeting water on the rear window, but it’s there: a tower, black as shale and rising vertical from the earth, its base lapped by turbulent vortices.

  Tim’s car is now well within the primary tornadic circulation. The more powerful subvortex closes in. The headlights glimmer once more at about 6:22 p.m.

  In all these years, Tim has learned to see the tics and patterns of the vortex. His probes aren’t all that have entered the unknown, glimpsing places no one alive had ever seen before. Tim has as well. And at these moments of extremity, it has always been his talent to see when the door is closing. He has always been able to find the seam, and to slip through to safety.

  But this time, it is too late.

  This is the tornado he can’t outrun.

  The dark wall closes over the road, and the headlights are extinguished.

  From the fleeing Yaris, this is the last living image of Tim Samaras, his son Paul, and Carl Young.

  They have a little more than a minute left before the real killer—the subvortex—engulfs them. What they say to one another—whether there is time to say anything at all, or whether they even see it coming—remains a mystery.

  But we do know what happens inside the storm, where no camera, no eye, can penetrate. Josh Wurman’s DOWs are still scanning. At around the time the tornado’s subvortex crosses US 81 and strikes the Weather Channel SUV, it becomes dislocated from its near-concentric loop around the core and is sent drifting outward. It begins to orbit the main tornado, describing a series of broad loops whose apexes manifest as tight curlicues, like the shapes a child might create with a Spirograph. Depending on its position, the velocity of the subvortex fluctuates drastically. Along the broad arc of the orbit, its speed increases exponentially as it races past the main circulation. But at each apex, the subvortex enters a tight curl that renders it nearly stationary, its high-speed winds scouring a single small area for seconds on end.

  When the vortex reaches its first apex, Tim, Carl, and Paul are still within view behind Robinson. They have 130 seconds left. The subvortex arcs counterclockwise across the storm like the hand of some exquisite clockwork. Then it hooks rapidly across the southern rim of the tornado and slingshots to the northeast. More than 200 yards in width, it screams over the fields at up to eighty miles per hour. It sweeps toward zero hour as though it has been counting down.

  With the storm moving over them from out of the south, the east is the last direction to which Tim would look for death to come. But shortly before 6:24 p.m., the subvortex appears before them seemingly out of nowhere, as it curls into its second apex. The tip of the apex brings a 200-mile-per-hour killing wind down upon their location on Reuter Road, near a shallow, cottonwood-lined creek. For the next twenty seconds, with the car now inside, the subvortex remains nearly stationary. Its core lofts the Cobalt and carries it south into a field, then east, and northeast over Reuter. The car hurtles, plunges, and tumbles for some 656 yards, before coming to rest in a canola patch.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  * * *

  HOW FAR FROM DAYLIGHT

  DAN ROBINSON KNOWS nothing of the headlights behind him, or of their disappearance. There is only the way ahead, the darkness to the south, and the race forward that will deliver him to daylight or the beast in his rearview. The rain falls not in a single, continuous sheet, but in battering waves, and the Yaris shudders as each successive series breaks over the frame with the force of a tide. In these moments, he sees nothing beyond the windshield, not even the hood of his own vehicle. He drives on in blind faith, praying the road is clear.

  The Yaris’s safety features seem determined to betray him. The traction control system detects the slippage induced by the wind and the mud and reduces engine power to one or both of the front wheels. Robinson backs off the gas to disengage the system and floors it again, repeating this maddening process every few seconds, so that he never attains a speed above forty-two miles per hour. He blows past the stop sign at Alfadale, then, an interminable mile later, the one at Radio.

  The Yaris fishtails in the current. The tornado core and the subvortex are closing in, and he can see that the rain curtains riding the outer circulation are drawing shut across the road ahead. He hits the gas and the brakes—and hits it again. The wide panorama of the southern plains is lost to a close-in wash of swirling gray and the white spume of aerosolized water, and there is no way to know what wind it carries. “I’ve gotta get out of whatever this is,” he says, punching the traction-control manual-override button. “The car just isn’t going! Traction control off!”

  Shortly before 6:24, he breaks through. The rain softens and the wind decelerates. Light creeps into the view behind, and with greater distance the eastern flank of the tornado reveals itself. It is the kind of sight Tim would have exulted in. Crepuscular shafts from the sun sift down onto the fields. A thin ribbon of horizon ends crisply at the southern edge, where the inflow feeds into the circulation like a smoking river. Skyscraper-size crags of dust slide from north to south across miles of tornado flank, drifting loosely, then hardening with the suggestion of vortical motion. Somewhere inside, a subvortex remains nearly motionless at its apex, but Robinson can’t see it from here.

  He brakes and finally looks at the thing that nearly killed him. “I just drove through that!” he shouts.

  Sensing an eastward tilt, he drives another few hundred yards down the road before stopping again. He grabs his camera, steps out, and begins filming. As it clears Reuter, subvortices coalesce, one after the next, into bone-colored columns moving at speeds for which there can be no response. The wind picks up again, the trees along the road fold over, and Robinson staggers backward. He sprints toward the ditch and dives to the ground. The rear window of the Yaris explodes under a barrage of hail, and the world around is waylaid with scouring braids of red dust and ballistic ice.

  A hailstone opens a freely bleeding gash on his face, but that’s the only scratch he’ll suffer today. He’s made it out.

  A few hundred yards at most separate Dan Robinson from the killing wind. To his west, just a few hundred yards separate Tim, Carl, and Paul from
daylight.

  * * *

  Moments after the subvortex enters Reuter Road, Howie Bluestein and his graduate assistants park RaXPol on the Interstate 40 off-ramp at Banner Road, no more than a few miles east of the circulation. Jeff Snyder sets a zero-degree elevation angle for the scan, so that some of the beam is directed into the ground, while the rest probes as low as the trees permit.

  The tornado has transformed dramatically since they turned their backs on it roughly ten minutes ago, at 6:15. At its widest, the span over which wind velocities exceed 110 miles per hour is 3.1 miles in diameter. To the extent that such a tornado may be assigned boundaries, the vortex has peaked at 2.6 miles in width, the largest ever recorded.

  If they study the southeastern edge closely, they will detect what is in all likelihood the subvortex responsible for the deaths of Tim, Carl, and Paul. It is all but invisible translating across the face of the parent tornado, except for that moment during which the orbit allows the dim southern sky to reveal its detachment. Though they can’t know this in real time, shortly after 6:25 p.m., RaXPol detects wind velocities in the subvortex in excess of 300 miles per hour. Even more remarkable is the rate at which it rotates around the southeastern flank of the parent tornado: 175 miles per hour, the fastest translational velocity on record, and roughly equivalent to the takeoff speed of a Boeing 747.

  “That is a violent tornado,” Snyder observes. “It looks like it’s moving due east now. It may be hooking northeast. We might be able to do an intercept on I-40 if it . . .”