He pauses and watches a current of cloud race low over the fields and into the southern flank. The beast is moving north toward the populous suburbs. Snyder’s hands are shaking.
The tornado then undergoes another structural change. The subvortex becomes difficult to track at 6:26. In its place, a ring of smaller suction vortices—as many as five or more at a time—are detected by the radar as scallop-shaped debris signatures. These are untraceable by any but the fastest-scanning mobile radar. RaXPol produces an image once every two seconds, and even then the suction vortices are spectral presences. “You’re lucky just to track one vortex for two, three, four frames,” Bluestein says. “They’re moving 150 miles per hour, and each lasts only three or four seconds. Do the math. It doesn’t take long for one to go all the way around the tornado, and they don’t even go all the way around. They tend to start in one place, rotate partially around the tornado, and disappear, and new ones start. It’s like a merry-go-round.”
Inside the suction vortices, Bluestein will later discover, are wind velocities on par with the highest ever observed. After two minutes of scanning, the radar indicates it is time to move. They retract the hydraulic outrigging and prepare RaXPol for the drive. The leading edge of the tornado is within a mile, moving rapidly northeastward.
Snyder sees a wall of rain, the dust at the surface whipping like breaking waves. They pull back onto an emptied Interstate 40 and push east, the antenna still revolving, still collecting the signal.
Leaves and small pieces of paper and housing insulation begin to float down onto the road ahead. “Don’t worry about the speed limit,” Bluestein instructs. “Go as fast as you can.”
* * *
By 6:43 p.m., the tornado is no longer detectable by radar; the Oklahoma City metro area averts the unthinkable—winds exceeding 300 miles per hour ripping across congested highways. By the time it reaches Interstate 40, the storm has grown so massive, has spawned so many new storms, that a torrent of cold outflow finally drowns the mesocyclone.
The damage path stretches largely through unpopulated areas of Canadian County. Eight are dead and a dozen more have drowned in the resulting flood. Included in the body count are the first three storm chasers ever to die in a tornado.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
* * *
GROUND TRUTH
CANADIAN COUNTY SHERIFF’S deputy Doug Gerten locates the Chevy Cobalt in a field south of El Reno shortly before 7:00 that evening. He’s sitting in his Crown Victoria, a stout, seasoned investigator wearing a ball cap over his buzz cut. He watches marble-size hailstones shatter like glass against the hood as what’s left of the storm moves away to the northeast, toward Interstate 35 and points just west of Oklahoma City.
Some forty yards to his north, Tim’s sedan is crushed nearly beyond recognition. Pieces are scattered across fields of wheat and canola on both sides of Reuter Road. For fifteen minutes Gerten waits, until finally the hail stops falling. Then he steps out onto a prairie coated with ice in summer and wades through canola that has been matted flush with the earth, stumbling in its viney tangles.
He approaches the sedan and notes that the front end has been ripped away. The motor is gone. The rear end and the trunk are either in another field or have been compacted and thrust into the cabin. Little more than the chassis remains, and all but one of the tires is missing. The roof of the sedan is now no higher than Gerten’s hip. It took the car apart, except for the stuff that was welded together, he thinks.
Through the rear window, he sees a body on the front passenger side. He circles around and peers inside at a man lying prone on the seat, which has snapped and now reclines into the back. His legs are folded in the floorboard, draped in a deflated air bag. He looks middle-aged, with short gray hair that has gone white at the temples. He wears no shirt and no shoes, but his seat belt is still on. Gerten doesn‘t need to feel for a pulse because he knows what death looks like. He notices broken limbs and lacerations, but no other terribly significant injuries.
He calls the sedan’s tag number in to the dispatcher to see if he can determine the man’s identity. The registration comes back to a woman from Colorado, named Kathy. He thinks he knows the name Samaras, though he isn’t sure how.
Gerten spots a Jotto Desk affixed to the center console, which signals storm chaser; he knows they often mount laptops to such desks to track forecasts. He reaches inside the car and pulls a wallet from the man’s back pocket to find his driver’s license. He looks from the license to the man’s face, visible only in profile. Gerten knows who he is now. On that show about storm chasers, he had often seen this view of Tim’s profile when he stared up at tornadoes.
From this moment on, when Gerten communicates with dispatch about Timothy Michael Samaras, he’ll use his cell phone instead of the radio. Chasers often carry police scanners, and Gerten worries that if they hear about this, they’ll converge on the location. He dials dispatch and calls in the “signal 30.”
All through the evening and into the wee hours, Gerten remains with Tim, waiting on the state medical examiner’s office. A wrecker should be coming by to pull the Cobalt from the field. The fire department is on the way; they’ll free Tim from the sedan’s mangled chassis with the Jaws of Life. After an hour or two on the scene, Gerten gets a call from a fellow deputy up the road. The man has found Carl. His body is roughly 500 yards west of Tim’s, half-submerged in a ditch running high with rainwater. Paul won’t be found until the next morning, once the water has receded.
The night deepens as the firemen come and go, lighting up this stretch of dirt road in the farm country south of El Reno. In a few short hours, the sun will rise on a bad landscape that’s only going to look worse in the light of morning. Gerten stays with Tim through it all.
As he waits by the Cobalt in the dark, he remembers for some reason the opening credits of Storm Chasers. This is the memory he wants to linger after Tim Samaras’s last ride. The guys are standing together on an empty plains back road a lot like this one, posing in front of Tim’s gleaming GMC diesel, arms crossed and brows furrowed. There they stand in Gerten’s mind, looking to the horizon, raring to light out toward the next target somewhere off in Kansas.
* * *
The next day, at around one in the afternoon, a young weather service researcher named Gabe Garfield comes across the wrecked sedan as he’s conducting a damage survey. He snaps a picture and sends it back to the National Weather Center. The image will soon spread throughout the meteorological community.
By nightfall, rumors have begun to swirl. The scuttlebutt holds that not only have three chasers perished at El Reno, but they were three of the most well-known and respected of them all. Marc Austin, at the Norman forecast office, sees Garfield’s photo and shares it with his wife, who soon sends it on to Ed Grubb. Ed had driven a mesonet for years. “The wheels, the door handles, the color . . . it all matches,” he tells her.
Too restless to sleep, Garfield and the Austins meet at an IHOP for coffee and try to convince one another that they are wrong. But early Sunday morning, June 2, as the sun rises, Tim’s brother Jim confirms the chaser community’s worst fears with a message on Tim’s Facebook page.
By noon, fellow chasers are combing the muddy fields north and south of Reuter Road, sweating in the oppressive heat and humidity. Marc and Sharon Austin are there, as is Garfield, their friend Erik Fox, and as many as a dozen other volunteers. The three probes are quickly recovered near a shallow creek. Later, another storm chaser finds Carl’s camera, lodged in the littoral mud.
The day after, Kathy Samaras and her daughter Amy arrive in Oklahoma to collect Tim and Paul. Jim has already arranged for a mortuary to prepare them for transport. That night, the Austins host Kathy and Amy at their home in Norman. They take them to dinner and are joined by Garfield and Fox, who’s a former cop and veteran with past training in investigations like the one at hand. Kathy has many questions, but they are reducible to one: How could this have happened to a chaser a
s skilled and experienced as her husband? Garfield does his best to explain. He had assumed someone else would take on the investigation, but he knows now that he and Fox have more access to the evidence than almost anyone.
Tuesday morning, Garfield and Fox return to Reuter Road. Fox approaches the still-saturated fields as though they are the scene of a terrible vehicle accident. He surmises the sedan had been carried south from the road and dropped trunk-first near a bend in the creek, where Paul, the probes, and most of their belongings were found. As Fox walks east, he locates six impact craters, each an average of 150 feet apart and gradually hooking to the northeast. The divots in the soil seem to follow the orientation of wheat lying flush in the direction of the wind. They lead across Reuter and north into the canola field where the sedan was found. It is obvious to Fox that the car hadn’t been airborne the entire 600-meter distance. This looks like a high-speed rollover, only worse than any he can imagine.
Meanwhile, Garfield gathers evidence to track the Cobalt’s movements that day. The video clips from Carl’s camera prove invaluable, while Dan Robinson’s rear-dash-camera footage allows Garfield to anchor their locations in time, and to orient them to the tornado center. He drives the route they took, turn for turn, and imagines he were in the car with them. Slowly, the portrait of a storm chase emerges, and Garfield begins to comprehend a series of decisions, each representing a link in the chain that would finally bind them. The rain wrapping around the northern flank ensured they were blind to the evolution of the monster to the south. The speed and erratic movement of the storm shrank the margin of error to near zero.
The dead-ending of Reuter at the airport was a critical blow, forcing them to lose precious ground to the tornado. It meant that Tim would never get ahead of a storm that was gaining speed. “You go south one mile, you go north one mile, and that’s two miles of driving time you lost,” Garfield says. “That corresponds to two and a half minutes.” At the end, those minutes meant everything.
Tim and Carl had a chance to escape, either by bailing early up Reformatory Road or by turning north onto US 81—though either would have meant aborting the deployment or attempting the intercept by taking a far more circuitous approach through rush-hour traffic.
As the Cobalt approached Route 81, the tornado was turning sharply northeast, then almost due north. Any chasers to the south of the storm would have known exactly what was happening. The rear-flank downdraft surge came screaming around the south of the mesocyclone, carrying with it an advancing wall of dust. Bruce Lee and Cathy Finley have dedicated their careers to this storm-scale feature, the one Tim feared would drive the vortex into a rope-out to the north. By US 81, Tim may have thought he’d already seen the storm’s shift north, but Lee and Finely believe the RFD gave it second life. It was the accelerant poured onto the flame. The tornado swelled to more than two and a half miles in width, and its forward speed doubled. The subvortex began its exterior orbit. It reminds Lee and Finley of Quinter, Kansas, the only tornado that has ever truly frightened them. “We’d never seen anything like that before and haven’t since,” Finley says, “Except for El Reno.” The only difference is that in Quinter, the turn to the north had saved their lives.
After the surge, Tim, Carl, and Paul’s last ride turned into a race they couldn’t win. Beyond US 81, they had one last chance to bail north to safety, along Alfadale Road. But here again they continued eastward, either because they didn’t understand how dangerous the intercept attempt had become or, if they did, because it was too late to make the turn. “By the time they figured out what was going on, they had ten seconds before they got to Alfadale,” Garfield says. “That isn’t a lot of time to brake and go north if you’re driving fifty miles per hour.”
Had they stopped shortly after Alfadale, they would have endured hellish winds, but they might have avoided the subvortex and survived. Yet they kept going because they had always been able to outrun tornadoes in the past. They had always been able to wriggle free. “They put their noses in some places we just wouldn’t,” Bruce Lee says. “Obviously, that comes with a price.”
By the time they were halfway between Alfadale and Radio, the fates of Tim, Carl, and Paul were fixed. “Storm chasers all think alike. It’s clear to me why Samaras did what he did. He wasn’t being irresponsible. He had to walk the edge. He’d walked it a hundred times before and came out just fine,” Garfield says. “If there had been an east option where the airport was, he’d have been just fine. If the tornado hadn’t turned north, they’d be fine. If rain hadn’t formed on the north side of the tornado, and if they hadn’t had their probes that day, they would have been fine. Because all of those elements came together, it all stacked up against them.”
But this sequence doesn’t even begin to describe how vanishingly remote the odds of what happened to them really were. For scale, the parent tornado was 2.6 miles across, which is wider than Manhattan. The subvortex, meanwhile, was roughly the width of a couple of football fields. Yet in all that survivable space within the parent tornado—scary though it would have been—they encountered the subvortex at one of only two locations where it would have been nearly stationary, and where they would have been exposed to its lethal winds for a protracted period.
Whether you believe in fate, bad luck, or neither, this was an unlikely outcome. It’s a little reminiscent of Jarrell, Texas, and the Double Creek Estates. The neighborhood was so small, and there was so much open farm- and ranchland surrounding it. Yet the tornado found that little postage stamp of a subdivision. So it was with Tim, Carl, and Paul. They ended up on that particular stretch of Reuter Road, the worst place in the storm, at precisely the wrong moment.
Once the car was overtaken, the details are grounded in fact but open to interpretation. Kathy Samaras asks Tim Marshall, one of Josh Wurman’s collaborators, to glean whatever information possible from the vehicle’s event data recorder, commonly known as the black box. She wants to know if there was something wrong with the Cobalt. Upon examination, however, the recorder gives no indication of a flat tire or any other mechanical malfunction that would have prevented escape. The transmission, though, holds one clue: it was in reverse, and the black box seems to indicate this gear shift happened shortly before the recording ended. “My guess is they probably knew they were in trouble,” Kathy says. “I think they saw something that made them realize they couldn’t go into what they were going into, and they had to get out. ‘We have to put it in reverse and get out of here.’ ”
A second theory comports with a last-ditch strategy employed by chasers who know they’re going to take a hit. In 2004, Tim was in pursuit of a tornado near Crystal Springs, Kansas, when he was overtaken by a rain curtain. He shouted to the driver, “Turn your car into the wind.” He wanted to give it the profile of least resistance, rather than allowing the broad, aerodynamically clunky flank of the minivan to take the brunt of the gale.
“The winds are coming out of the north, and Tim Samaras knew that,” Garfield says. Perhaps as Carl was backing up to angle the Cobalt into the wind, the subvortex came unexpectedly out of the east and caught them broadside.
Of course, there is a simpler third scenario: that the reverse gear was accidental, caused by tumbling metal against earth.
One of the few facts known with any certainty is that the three never had a chance to deploy the probes. The devices were all switched off.
More than a month later, Doug Gerten, the sheriff’s deputy who found Tim’s body, takes another drive along Reuter Road. He stops near the creek and walks along its banks. Pieces of the Cobalt—a car-stereo speaker, a headlamp, a bumper—still litter the fields and the ditch. Down in the creek, he spots something black partially submerged in a few inches of water. From the shallow water, he plucks out Paul’s camera.
What he holds in his hand is the final record. There is one thing about Tim’s son that everyone knows: he was always filming and probably had been up to the last moments of his life. These may be stored on the c
amera’s data disk, or they may have been erased by weeks spent in the water. “I talked with Kathy about that,” Garfield says. “She does not want to know what happened. She’s content with what she knows.”
* * *
The deaths of Tim and Paul are a hard blow to everyone in their family and the chasing community. For Tim’s son Matt Winter, there is a sense of whiplash. It had been only seven years since he’d met his biological father. They’d had so many years to catch up on, and years to do so—but now that time is gone. Tim and Winter hadn’t talked much during 2013. On May 20, eleven days before Tim died, Winter had sent him a picture of his five-year-old son, Peyton, climbing an archway in the house like a little monkey. Winter thought it was funny because his older son, Nick, had done the same thing at Tim’s Lakewood house the first time Winter brought his family to visit.
“Does this look familiar?” Winter wrote.
“Yes, very much so,” Tim had responded. “Looks like a certain other little guy I know.”
On May 31, Winter remembered pulling up the radar feed depicting the storm over El Reno while he was at work at Nationwide Insurance. To him, it looked like a hurricane—bigger than any other mesocyclone he had ever seen. A couple of days later, Jenny called. He took the call in the conference room, and she tried to tell him the news—that his father and half brother were gone—but she couldn’t get out the words. Kathy picked up the phone and finished for her.
Winter sagged into the nearest chair, and a wave of nausea washed over him. When he hung up, he told his boss he had to leave and walked outside to the parking garage. It was a sunny day, but he says he heard the concussion of thunder. He ran to the edge of the parking garage and looked up. “It’s one tiny, low-topped thunderstorm over Des Moines,” he says. “It was so random. Dew points were way too low to support any kind of development. I felt like it was some sort of sign, maybe from him, saying good-bye.”
The Man Who Caught the Storm Page 24