Storm Kings

by Lee Sandlin

  Theodore Fujita died in Chicago in the fall of 1998, at the age of seventy-eight. In his later life, whenever he was asked what accomplishment he was most proud of, he’d say it was the campaign to install Doppler radar at airports for the detection of microbursts, which has in the last few decades saved hundreds and maybe even thousands of lives. But the microburst research project had also resulted in another, wholly private accomplishment, and this was the one that the people who knew him would often recall first when they talked about him.

  It happened at the end of the spring in 1982. He was working then at Denver International Airport, a field notorious for its high winds and its unexpected and violent storms. Fujita considered it a highly promising ground for his microburst hunt. The research team was positioning three mobile Doppler units in the empty country north of the airport to see what distances and angles gave them the best coverage of the runways. Fujita himself never had much patience for that kind of grunt work; he tended to leave the calibration and data collection to his team and would instead spend his time driving around the back roads of Colorado by himself, watching for storms and trying to catch an unfolding microburst with his camera. But on June 12, Fujita did stop off briefly at one of the radar units. The team was tracking a line of thunderstorms advancing across the open country from the east. Fujita stood by himself, idly snapping photographs of the storm clouds. It was late afternoon; the western sky was still clear, and brilliant golden sunlight was falling across the landscape. The storm front was lit up in brilliant billows of white and purple. Then, just below the cloud deck, against a deep blue background, a frail white snake appeared that curved and bulged and undulated and melted back into nothingness.

  Later that night the entire research team held a party to celebrate. It was the first time Fujita had seen an actual tornado.

  Epilogue

  The Wild Hunt

  Irving, Kansas—the town where John Finley had done his first field report and where Dorothy Gale had lived and died—survived the mysterious double tornado of May 1879. Within a few years, the evidence of the disaster had largely been erased. The destroyed houses and stores had been rebuilt, and the scarred earth replanted. Life there resumed its old meandering and obscure course. At the end of the nineteenth century, Irving appeared to be indistinguishable from any of the other small market towns of northern Kansas. It prospered mainly because it was at the junction of two major railroad lines, the Union Pacific and the Missouri Pacific, and grew to be a natural gathering point for farmers and speculators from around the region. Irving had a strong and flourishing bank, which dealt almost entirely in agricultural loans, and a successful newspaper that published weather forecasts and crop prices. It had a dry-goods store, a feed store, a smithy, and a lawyer’s office. It had a telegraph office, a postal express office, and a public library—not a bad showing for a town with a population of four hundred.

  Irving went through its share of hard times with the new century. There were two catastrophic floods. There were economic convulsions: panics and bank failures, collapses of the regional economy. And there was the Dust Bowl—the inevitable consequence of the destruction of the old prairie. When the long droughts came in the 1930s, the drying and crumbling topsoil was no longer held in place by the yards-deep mats of the grass roots. Instead, the winds blew the topsoil away, acre after acre, windstorm after windstorm. More than a hundred million acres of arable land were scoured clean, and the topsoil was sifting down as gritty dust all across eastern America and falling on ships in the Atlantic Ocean. Irving and its surrounding farms somehow hung on, just on the edge of the zone of greatest devastation; western Kansas and the Texas and Oklahoma Panhandles were as broken and lifeless as the deserts of Mars.

  The decades that followed were green, a time of abundant rainfall and flourishing crops. The region’s water table, which had gone down almost to sea level during the drought, came back up to its old level in the 1940s. Irving should have thrived. But the great harvests of the 1950s drove down agricultural prices almost to nothing, and farmers to survive had to get their crops to the buyers as cheaply as possible. That meant transport by truck on the new interstate highways, rather than by the old railroads. It was Irving’s bad luck that it was nowhere near any interstate on-ramp. The small farms around it began to fail and were sold out to gigantic agricultural corporations. In the late 1950s, many of the last surviving farms were bought out for the construction of a dam and an artificial lake. The town dwindled down to a few crossroads stores and a post office. By the end of the decade the stores had gone out of business and the post office had closed. Irving became a ghost town.

  In the early 1990s, people began showing up in Irving again. They didn’t stay; there was nowhere to stay. They would come down the old highway to the crossroads, and they would park for a long look around. They traveled in odd caravans—lines of battered minivans and SUVs, some of them bristling with antennas and small satellite disks. Their passengers all wore jeans and work shirts; they carried laptops and video cameras. They would pace around the meadowland and lay out picnics in the scattered stands of trees, and they would gesture at the horizon and argue about where the tornadoes of 1879 had come from.

  The chasers are on the road every spring, driving hundreds of miles a day, toward any place where the skies are growing turbulent and the thunderheads are sprouting. The weather tourists who pay to ride with the chasers are never guaranteed the sight of a tornado, and many of them do the tours for years without a glimpse. The closest some ever get is the spectacle of a gigantic supercell wall cloud rotating languidly across half the sky and then trailing off into inconsequential downpours.

  What people mainly see on those trips is the blank prairie landscape fanning out on either side of the interstates, spreading around main highways, and enfolding the wandering tracks of county roads. There are unimaginably large expanses of cultivated fields, dotted here and there with curved tin sheds like miniature army barracks; there are the endlessly unwinding franchise strips: fast-food restaurants, an auto parts store, a furniture outlet, and a scattering of hulking, nameless warehouses, all islanded in wastes of freshly laid asphalt.

  Sometimes the highway grows shabbier, and the roadside clutter thickens into a town. A down-at-the-heels place: the businesses along the main street are dime stores, liquor stores, discount clothing stores, bargain appliance stores, dry cleaners, and Laundromats. A shoe store has huge cardboard bins of unsorted shoes sitting out on the sidewalk. The grocery store has a mechanical coin-operated rocking horse in front. The traffic lights are antiques—knobby yellow cubes that dangle from wires, drooping over the intersections like Japanese lanterns. Lunch is at a counter in a dime store. Hot dogs wrapped in white-bread toast, a tangle of crinkle-cut fries limp as caterpillars, two pale circlets of pickle, and the local cola served in a paper cone in a metal holder. On the store shelves are dolls staring from behind yellowed cellophane wrappers.

  After sunset the landscapes deepen into vagueness: shapeless woodlands, vast blurs of farmlands, mysterious glows of subdivisions hidden behind the horizon. In the middle depths there are always the silhouettes of power pylons and radio masts—complicated black cutouts tipped with slow red pulsing lights. Dinner means burgers at a back table at a truck stop bar, where the chasers pour out pitchers of beer and argue about the next day’s hunt. Later, long after midnight, two of them might meet by the ice machine in a motel parking lot, next to the deserted swimming pool; maybe they’d see a flicker of lightning along the horizon and wonder if tomorrow their luck would change.

  And maybe tomorrow it would. The morning would be unusually humid, skin already sticking to the seats in the van as soon as the sun is up. A day unwinding through small towns crisscrossed by power lines and marked by water towers and steeples. Roads dwindling into two-lane, ragged-shouldered blacktops that rose and fell for hours through the sultry green hill country. Fences fantastically twisting, fences spiked and thorny lines of unpainted wood. At the
intersections are totem poles displaying a clutter of rusted road designation signs—county roads, U.S. highways, the red-white-and-blue interstate shield—with arrows pointing off in wild directions. All the while, stipples of cloud bulge low over the landscape, now and then emitting spatters of warm rain.

  Then in late afternoon the air gets dark. The rain thickens, and mingling among its steady hiss are flicks and taps as though tiny glass beads are striking the windows. The tapping turns into banging and cracking and thunking. Hailstones skitter down the windshield and hop around on the hood like popcorn. The rain seethes over the windows. A blare of light and a blast of thunder in front of the caravan; another to the side; another right behind. Everybody sits frozen, except for the guides, who mutter numbers they’re reading off the glowing panels of their laptops. Now and then they call over their shoulders, “Hold on, folks!” One passenger talks to himself in an irritated monotone, as though trying to remember some lesson in class where he hadn’t been paying attention: “Now, do we get out of the car or not? Is it safer in here if we don’t touch anything metal? Should we try to wait this out or not?” The windows drown in froth as though inside a car wash.

  Then the light changes. The fields and woodlands outside the window begin to regain their solidity. The runnels of rain down the windows fray away to nothing. The sign totem reappears in its expected spot; the cornstalks nod and bob together. Down the road, something is gliding sidewise through the middle distance, a vast ghost of filthy brown and black. The sun comes out in the western sky and illuminates a gigantic gliding cloud moving away with lumbering grace, crowned by brilliant white cauliflower domes and strewing dragon tails of lightning in all directions. At its base, amid a turmoil of black earth like the wake of a furious motorboat, is a curving, tapered funnel cloud, glowing reddish gold in the late-afternoon light. Above in the dazzlingly clear air is a half-formed rainbow. Reaching up overhead are a scattering of contrails crisscrossing through the highest promontories of the thunderhead. Lightning flickers there, like the glare and smoke of an eternal battle, Godzilla versus the military, drifting on endlessly toward the horizon.

  The beginnings of the modern tornado chase go back to an incident that took place in April 1953 at a civilian radar project jointly run by the Illinois state government and the University of Illinois. The project used a military-surplus radar unit to measure rainfall and water levels in local streams and lakes. The unit was being tested at an airport weather station in Champaign, Illinois. The tester, an electrical engineer named Donald Staggs, happened to be at work one afternoon when a large wave of thunderstorms passed nearby. Staggs was so fascinated by the complicated patterns of blurs and specters on the radar monitor that he stayed into the evening to watch for more. Some time after sunset another line passed, and Staggs saw a mysteriously sharp and well-defined shape appear amid a cluster of rain echoes. It was like a large hook gliding through the dark in the depths of the storm. The radar unit happened to be fitted with a camera that filmed the images on the monitor; later analysis of the film showed that the mysterious hook could be matched up exactly with the track of a passing tornado. Other radar units would later record the same hook in other storms, and it eventually acquired a name: the tornado vortex signature. It typically appears at the heart of a thundercloud about twenty minutes before a tornado descends.

  The news that tornadoes could be detected before they touched the ground caused a revolution in the study of severe weather. When the new generation of Doppler radars first came into use at the end of the 1960s, research scientists began actively hunting for tornadoes in zones of violent atmospheric disturbance. In May 1973, storm intercept teams from the National Severe Storms Laboratory tracked a tornado as it approached and destroyed the small town of Union City, Oklahoma. The chasers were able to spot the tornado as it was forming and follow it through its complete life cycle, from the first stirrings of its debris cloud on the ground and the will-o’-the-wisp of its embryonic funnel to its black grandly swollen maturity to the final sinuous twists of its dissipation, while a Doppler radar simultaneously recorded the movement of the tornado vortex signature within the parent storm.

  Chasers in those days were scientists from the Weather Service or professors and grad students from local universities. They drove battered station wagons and communicated by walkie-talkie and shortwave radio. Their navigation was done by means of crumpled, coffee-stained road maps kept in glove compartments. Their first results were unimpressive by today’s standards: grainy home movies taken through car windows, distant photographs snapped from the highway shoulder. Only gradually on their chases were they joined by amateur tornado buffs who brought their own lavish equipment. By the 1990s and early years of the twenty-first century, there were entrepreneurs of the tornado safari who brought in weather tourists from all over the world. Today the caravans are customized trucks and vans and SUVs with armoring and shatterproof glass, carrying a carapace of antennas and dishes and Plexiglas observation bubbles and built-in video cameras. Sometimes tornadoes in the open country are encircled by multiple chase teams, made up of government meteorologists and tornado video companies, all recording real-time data from portable Doppler units. It’s often said the major danger of tornado hunting now is of a head-on collision with another pursuit car.

  The chasers speak their own lingo unintelligible to the locals. Part of it is the technical vocabulary of the professional meteorologists—all about dry lines and CAPEs and rear-flanking downdraft columns, mesocyclonic rotation, and vertical instability. But they also have their own ad hoc terms that come from their direct observations of the weird and multiform manifestations of the tornado cloud. (Orthodox meteorologists resisted using this slang for years, because they thought it was unscientific; now chaser lingo creeps into the most stolid research papers.) They talk about the wall cloud and the beaver tail, the debris ball and the barber pole. The gigantic rotating mass of a supercell cloud is the mother ship. The tornado funnel is a tube or a wedge or a cigar or a stovepipe or an elephant trunk, and when it dwindles during its last minutes into a thin undulating snake, they say it is roping out.

  The chasers have also amassed a huge inchoate library of tornado images—first film and then digital video, much of it posted to YouTube: a genre sometimes called “torn porn.” The videos show tornadoes in countless forms, squat buzzing whirlwinds and vast soul-catching curves, blurry churns of black smoke and white fluted vases smooth as pewter. What they do not show are the bizarre and inexplicable sights that have been reported by generations of eyewitnesses. Torn porn has brought an end to hundreds of years of tornado folklore.

  Where, for instance, are the strange lights so often reported around the funnel? The sparkling fire, the multicolored glows, the ruby-red eye at the funnel’s heart? Not once have they been caught on video, and most chasers doubt they ever existed. The sickly green cloud color just before the funnel descends, on the other hand, has been documented. But the thinking now is that it’s caused by dense cloud cover and has nothing to do with tornadoes in particular. The most surprising finding has been that tornadoes do not repeatedly rise and fall or skip over the landscape like a stone in a pond; as the hundreds of videos unmistakably show, a tornado on the ground stays there until it ropes out. (It’s possible that what the eyewitnesses interpret as a rise and fall is actually a tornado breaking up and a new tornado forming in its place.)

  What else has been debunked? Hiding in the southwest corner of the basement. As is amply demonstrated by torn porn, and repeatedly confirmed by new analyses of damage tracks, the greatest danger in a tornado is flying debris. (At three hundred miles an hour, even a piece of cardboard can be fatal.) No corner of the average basement is particularly safe; what you need is a windowless room, preferably a bathroom (the pipes in the walls provide extra protection). In open country, it’s suicidal to take shelter beneath a freeway overpass, which acts something like a wind tunnel: the least bad choice is to lie facedown in a ditch in a field an
d hope for the best. And with the new understanding that houses do not explode when a tornado passes over them has come an end to the advice about equalizing the air pressure. “Don’t bother opening the windows,” the experts like to say now. “The tornado will do that for you.”

  The new assurance about tornadoes, the authoritative expertise with which both chasers and meteorologists currently speak, can give the impression that the danger of tornadoes—well, if it’s not ended altogether, at least now has been routinized and is being managed by professionals. For a tornado to touch down outside a National Weather Service watch area is essentially unheard of today; the effective time for a tornado warning has been stretched to twenty minutes or more. Tornadoes approaching major metropolitan areas are followed on the ground by chase teams and swarmed in the air by helicopters; their progress is now-cast on TV stations and tracked by real-time Doppler radar on the Web. Some tornadoes have been so closely monitored that the warnings for them have practically been issued street by street.

  And yet that feeling of complacency can be cured by almost any successful tornado chase. There is a moment when the chase caravan approaches the fresh damage track of an active tornado and the awe and the exhilaration of the pursuit suddenly collapse into sickened horror. The lead car slows and begins threading through scatterings of debris—shredded sheets of plasterboard, splinters of furniture, the twisted shell of a water heater like a crashed missile; a pastoral roadside diner or gas station has been cratered; the tornado receding beyond the tree lines is suddenly lit up by silent flares of white light as power lines are torn, while around the cone of the funnel are the whirling black scraps of wrecked rooftops and shattered cars. The experienced chasers know what’s coming: everything ahead on the road is going to be worse.