The Man Who Caught the Storm

by Brantley Hargrove

  * * *

  On May 9, 2016, Tim Marshall stared down a tornado near Sulphur, Oklahoma, watching for the left or right drift. He dropped his last remaining pod on a country road and fled with the wind at his heels. Based on the surrounding damage and an examination of DOW radar data, the pod caught the outer edge. That day, Marshall claimed one of the closest hits in history—and the first since Tim’s death. The scientific effort marched forward, one step more, one step wiser, though perhaps without the same verve. It was no Manchester; it wasn’t a core strike.

  As difficult, perilous, and often frustrating as this work can be, it’s more important now than ever. Recent research into our changing climate, and its effect on severe-storm activity in North America, is sobering yet inconclusive. We know that as the oceans warm, increased rates of evaporation will flood the skies with elevated concentrations of moisture. This means more instability, more CAPE, more fuel for violent storms. But there are also studies that project an attendant decrease in wind shear. Tornadoes require converging air masses to form. Most climate scientists speculate that the result may be a lower overall number of tornadoes.

  But there’s an important catch: when the elements do align, the tornadoes and the outbreaks that result may be much, much worse. One analysis indicates that this is already happening.

  Two statisticians, Elizabeth Mannshardt of North Carolina State University, and Eric Gilleland of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, recently compiled more than forty years’ worth of atmospheric soundings, focusing primarily on the two biggest supercell indicators: wind shear and CAPE. When they plotted tornadic storms over these years, what they found was alarming. The “return period,” or the average amount of time that elapses between a given extreme tornadic event, appears to be decreasing. In other words, the extremes are becoming less rare, a trend line that may well worsen.

  As case studies, Mannshardt and Gilleland examined two recent tornadic events: the May 20, 2013, Moore, Oklahoma, supercell, and the twister that claimed the lives of Tim, Carl, and Paul near El Reno. According to their analysis, these storms are exceedingly rare, situated somewhere near the outer edge of statistical probability. Historically, Moore should only see a tornado of that ferocity once every 400 years. But between 1999 and 2013, the city has been struck by two historic EF5 tornadoes and one EF4.

  The El Reno event is even more exceptional. For this storm’s atmospheric conditions, the return period is once every 900 years. Tim would never have chosen this fate for himself, his son, and Carl, but he would almost certainly have been thrilled that he was present for a nearly once-in-a-millennium event.

  The statistical model on which these figures are based, however, assumes a constant climate over the last forty-two years—which is not the case. When the model allows for a steady increase in certain parameters, such as atmospheric instability produced by warming oceans, the research indicates that such massive storms are likely to recur far more frequently as the climate changes.

  There is hope, as research into massive tornadoes continues. One of the most promising new research initiatives involves TWISTEX’s own Bruce Lee and Cathy Finley. With TWISTEX at loose ends, they partnered in 2014 with a scientist and computer whiz on a first-of-its-kind project. Leigh Orf, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, had just made a major breakthrough, using raw atmospheric data and one of the fastest supercomputers in the world, to simulate a supercell and EF5 tornado from birth to death—simply by feeding it a primed atmospheric sounding and letting a state-of-the-art physics program run its course. The wedge in his uncannily lifelike visualizations bears an unmistakable resemblance to the real May 24, 2011, event on which it is based. Orf has brought Lee and Finley aboard because he now needs field scientists who’ve witnessed the beast in the flesh; his data is so formidable and in such high resolution that he needs experts who know what to look for, and where.

  The three now have on their hands the answer to every question a scientist could possibly ask about a single monster tornado. Represented by the ones and zeros of computer code are all the internal currents that mobile radar and even in situ probes could never see. As of this writing, the trio are still hard at work teasing apart and reverse engineering the sky’s most complex riddle. The next superstorm they plan to simulate is the one that killed their friends in El Reno.

  EPILOGUE

  LORETTA YOST’S SPEECH is as austere as the plains—clipped, a little formal, belonging to another century. She wears a simple cotton dress, a black cardigan, and a black Mennonite prayer cap that covers much of her hair, iron gray with streaks as pure white as the snow outside. Her late husband, Harold, was a bricklayer and had built this house himself. It is small but warm, smells of freshly baked chocolate-chip cookies, and is nestled amid the fields. Through the window she can see the stubble from September’s soybean harvest.

  Loretta opens her journal and begins to recount the day of June 24, 2003, on her family’s twenty-four-acre farm near Manchester, South Dakota. Her grandchildren had been splashing around in a small plastic swimming pool on the west side of their rambling, nearly hundred-year-old home. One of her grandsons, four-year-old Jacob, was reclining in a lounge chair near the pool as though he were at the lapping edge of the ocean, and not on the high South Dakotan plains. The place was surrounded by elm, spruce, and cottonwood trees so thick that the house could scarcely be seen from the dirt road.

  At around six thirty that evening, Harold, Loretta, their sons, daughters, and grandchildren all loaded into the pickup and drove over to dinner at the Unruh farm, on the other side of Manchester. They brought their wooden ice-cream maker with them to prepare dessert. By the time they arrived, Mike Unruh’s weather radio was wailing. A tornado had been spotted a hundred miles southwest, between Fort Thompson and Woonsocket. “A long ways away, we thought. Did Mike turn the weather radio off? I don’t remember hearing it anymore that evening,” Loretta later wrote in her journal.

  Liz Unruh made a pizza, and they followed dinner with ice cream, complete with strawberries and chocolate syrup. It was during dessert that the phone rang. Mike Unruh’s brother was on the line. “If you look east,” he said, “you’ll see a tornado.”

  They filed out of the house and gathered in the yard. Off in the east, they saw it, “a short, fat, gray tornado. I don’t remember being scared,” Loretta wrote. “We kind of walked down the road going east, children and all. Above, big clouds were building. We scattered out on the road looking east, feeling quite a bit of excitement. Bill Fox came by in his pickup and said he’d heard there was a storm in Manchester, and said he was going over. ‘That’s where we live,’ I exclaimed.”

  As Loretta spoke, insulation began to flutter down around them like snow. They walked back to the Unruh house. Harold, Mike Unruh, and Loretta’s son Ace prepared to leave and see about the farm. Loretta’s daughter Eva called their house, but the answering machine never picked up.

  The phone rang again at the Unruhs’. This time, it was Harold’s brother on the line. He asked Liz, “Are they there?”

  “Yes,” Liz said. “They’re all here.”

  “Their place is gone.”

  Loretta ran out of the house. Harold, Mike, and Ace were about to pull away. She caught up to them and relayed the bitter news.

  It was their basement into which Kingsbury County sheriff Charlie Smith had called, “Harold? Harold?” The mud-coated basset hound found wandering around the wood and cinder blocks was their dog, Bailey. It was the destruction of their home that shed turbulence into the pressure profile sampled by Tim Samaras’s turtle. The defining moment of Tim’s life is theirs, too.

  Their new brick home was the last big project of Harold’s life; he died in 2008 at the age of seventy. Loretta and her son Lockwood offer to take me on a drive. We pile into their minivan and head into Manchester. The old sign still stands, battered, bowed in at the center, its edges curling around the wooden posts. We step into the kind of bitter prairie col
d that makes skin sting and bones ache, and we walk toward the monument to a ghost town. Harold had laid its flagstone foundation, and at the center is a marble plaque with raised bronze lettering that tells the story of Manchester’s end: JUST PAST SUPPERTIME, AT ABOUT 7:30 P.M., TUESDAY, JUNE 24, 2003, THE SKY VIRTUALLY FELL ON MANCHESTER. It goes on to say that though the F4 destroyed the artifacts of the township’s 122-year history, the neighbors banded together to help each other just the same. As a coda, the last line is a quote: “THAT’S THE BIGGEST DROP EVER RECORDED,” SAID TORNADO RESEARCHER TIM SAMARAS, “LIKE STEPPING INTO AN ELEVATOR AND HURTLING UP 4,000 FEET IN TEN SECONDS.”

  We climb back into the minivan, and Lockwood steers over dirt roads hummocked with snowdrifts. A John Deere tractor mechanic, he wears tan leather gloves and a canvas jacket that smells of diesel. He brakes at an empty field near Redstone Creek, and he and Loretta look out over what had once been their home.

  “The foundation of the garage is still there,” Loretta observes.

  “The house was east and south of that slab,” Lockwood says. “It’s been cleaned up, pushed in. The barn was right there. The hog barn was behind it.”

  “Every time I come out here in the summertime,” Loretta says, “I hear the birds sing, the meadowlarks.”

  “We had a row of poplars clear to the ditch to the north, and maples to the east.”

  The weak winter sun hangs low in the sky, a dying coal through the haze. I walk away from the car to a spot on the dirt road near the intersection of 206th Street and 425th Avenue. To the east, in a field of nubbed corn, the slouching hulk of a steel granary remains where it had been deposited nearly twelve years before.

  I look to the west and try to imagine a minivan fishtailing down a rain-slicked road, its gravel the consistency of cake batter. Tim is behind the wheel, and he’s barreling east with an eye on the tornado to his right, intuiting the location where two trajectories will converge. He picks this patch of dirt road, hurriedly deploys the turtle, and speeds away, perhaps watching in the rearview mirror.

  He doesn’t know it yet, but even as the Yost farm fails, even as the surrounding soil, steel, and wood lift into the sky, neither the howling gale nor the shower of debris will move Tim’s remarkable creation. It catches the storm, and it holds fast.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  IN DOCUMENTING THE life of Tim Samaras, from the first appliances he dismantled on his boyhood bedroom floor to his last moments alive, I relied heavily on a network of dozens of intimates—family and friends, chase buddies and colleagues. Having never met Tim myself, I knew him at the start only as the daring researcher on the Discovery Channel’s Storm Chasers. Without those close to Tim—who generously opened up their lives and shared hours upon hours of their time—this work of journalism would never have been possible.

  Nothing in this account has been fictionalized—no characters, events, or dialogue are composites. Any direct quotations are drawn from recordings of Tim, his writings, news reports, and the accounts of those present for the events in question. Any scenes or glimpses into his interior world spring from his own personal correspondence, his or his colleagues’ voluminous chase footage, and interviews with the people who knew him best.

  Just as essential to recreating this rarefied subculture were my own experiences beneath the storm. In the reporting of this book, I spent weeks on the road chasing tornadoes with some of Tim’s best friends. I knew that to understand him, I’d first have to find the swirling wind myself. Over days, over thousands of miles, over too many busts and near misses, I lived in Tim’s world. I felt what must have been the same exhaustion, the same boredom, the same disappointment at each storm that failed to deliver. After three weeks I was almost ready to give up. Then, our luck suddenly changed. The next day I found myself in Nebraska, face to face with two simultaneously occurring EF4 tornadoes. I got it then. I have at least some grasping sense, now, of why Tim went out year after year in search of them. I know how this wonder, this adrenaline, can exert a pull as irresistible as gravity. And I’d be lying if I said I haven’t gone chasing since, even though this book is finished. I feel that pull still: when I hear the big black clouds are getting ready to boil, I can’t help but wish I were there. More practically, those weeks spent with seasoned veterans like Ed Grubb, Ben McMillan, Tony Laubach, and Dan Robinson gave me insight into how chasers think, how they operate near dangerous storms, and how Tim, in particular, maneuvered for the intercept. Though my own adventures with these men are not recounted in The Man Who Caught the Storm, they nonetheless inform every page.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  FIRST AND FOREMOST, I want to thank Kathy Samaras. Over the more than three years it took to research and write this book, I thought of her daily. The memories she has shared constitute the most closely held truths of her life. Many were painful, but her words opened a window of understanding on the man she loved. If this book manages to capture even a flicker of Tim’s fire, it’s because of her. In equal measure, Tim’s daughters, Amy and Jenny, and his son Matt each illuminated Tim’s personality and life as a father. And I’m grateful as well for their precious stories about Paul, a beloved brother and son. Indeed, the generosity of the Samaras clan, including Tim’s brother Jim, has made this book possible.

  I relied heavily on the kindnesses and forbearance of those who knew and loved Tim Samaras, Paul Samaras, and Carl Young. Bob Young, Carl’s father, spent hours reminiscing with me about his son. Ben McMillan, TWISTEX’s resident EMT and my hurricane buddy, brought me along for one of my first storm chases; we spent an exhausting and often exhilarating week in pursuit of the swirling wind, trekking from one end of Tornado Alley to the other. With Ed Grubb and Tony Laubach, two stalwart mesonet drivers, I had the incredible experience of witnessing two simultaneously occurring EF4 tornadoes in Nebraska. McMillan, Laubach, and Grubb invited me into their singular world and, in turn, allowed me to better know Tim, Carl, and Paul.

  The learning curve of atmospheric science is a precipitous one, to say the least, and as a writer, not a meteorologist, I remain stuck near the bottom. To ensure that this book presented the science accessibly for the layperson and accurately enough for the well-informed, I sought out the help of talented researchers and forecasters, none so often as Gabe Garfield, a research meteorologist at the Cooperative Institute for Mesoscale Meteorological Studies. Gabe patiently fielded what must have seemed an inexhaustible stream of questions, not only about the science but about Tim, Carl, and Paul’s final chase. Headquartered at the National Weather Center in Norman, Oklahoma, he took up the inquiry himself in the days, weeks, and months after the El Reno storm. He drove me along the route they took, annotating nearly every moment with their words and details about the tornado’s location and evolution. As a cheerful and dependable resource, Gabe was essential to my reporting.

  Over these years, I’ve had the opportunity to get to know a vast network of chasers, researchers, and friends whose lives Tim has touched, and whose recollections helped me to piece together the arc of his own life: Bruce Lee and Cathy Finley, TWISTEX’s seasoned field researchers, were kind enough to share their unvarnished accounts of the team’s most important intercepts—warts and all—including deployment footage that put me in the passenger seat next to them. Along with Tim, they were TWISTEX’s heart; it would be impossible to overstate the importance of their testimony. Larry Brown, Tim’s longtime boss at ARA, DRI, and NTS, led me through the development of Tim’s unusual skillset. Tim’s earliest comrades-in-arms, Pat Porter and Brad Carter, told me stories about his early chases, in a time before the Samaras name rang out in the world of atmospheric science. Anton Seimon, a fellow chaser and researcher, was a tremendous resource in more ways than one. Not only was he present for one of HITPR’s first missions, his correspondence with Tim yielded essential insight into the mind of a man I could never meet. As if this weren’t enough, his incredible website, the “El Reno TED: Tornado Environment Display,” acted as a surrogate for my own ey
es when I couldn’t experience what Tim, Carl, and Paul saw at El Reno. Bill Gallus, an Iowa State professor and one of Tim’s early supporters, illuminated for me a milieu where a man with Tim’s credentials—or lack thereof—was never entirely at home. Joshua Wurman, whose Doppler on Wheels is the only reason we know exactly what Tim, Carl, and Paul encountered on Reuter Road, contributed a far more nuanced understanding of this book’s subject than would otherwise be possible.

  Beyond these pages, I’d be remiss not to mention my own support system. My agent, David Patterson, saw from the beginning that Tim’s life and works cried out for a detailed account. My editor, Jonathan Cox, is the best I’ve ever partnered with. Before he came aboard, I was lost belowdecks; he helped me see the rest of the ship. I can’t begin to imagine what this book would look like without Jon.

  As we wrestled with the telling of this story, I leaned on my wife, Renee, for support, both emotionally and financially; at the end of a tough day, when it seemed like things weren’t going so well, she was my shelter. My mom and dad, Laurie and Hal, and my sister, Holly, have always been there for me, and these past few years have been no different. Last, but certainly not least, I must thank my friends and fellow writers, Tara Nieuwesteeg, George Getschow, and Mike Mooney. Sometimes they were the best sounding boards I could ask for. Their feedback was spot-on when I needed it most. I look forward to returning the favor.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  © CATHERINE DOWNES

  BRANTLEY HARGROVE is a journalist who has written for Wired, Popular Mechanics, and Texas Monthly. In his reporting, he has explored the world of South American jewel thieves who terrorize diamond dealers in South Florida. He’s gone inside the effort to reverse-engineer supertornadoes using supercomputers. And he has chased violent storms from the Great Plains down to the Texas coast, including a land-falling Category 4 hurricane and one of the rarest tornadic events in recent memory: twin EF4 tornadoes that chewed through a small Nebraskan farming village. He lives in Dallas, Texas, with his wife, Renee, and their two cats. The Man Who Caught the Storm is his first book.