The Mercy of the Sky: The Story of a Tornado (11 page)

It seemed to many like a strange choice for a rising meteorologist to choose a television market that had regularly been at the bottom of the top fifty in the country. But given its position right at the heart of the nation’s Tornado Alley, Oklahoma began to gain a reputation as a place to be for exciting weather, a market where the news stations were like cutting-edge weather scientists. They were using technology that stations in other, larger cities simply didn’t have access to. At the same time, interest in weather was skyrocketing. At the University of Oklahoma, which was finally offering a meteorology degree, enrollment jumped in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and there were many dual majors of broadcast journalism and meteorology. Many people, it seemed, wanted to be Gary England, and when I was in high school and college, I was one of them.

I
t wasn’t until 1989 that England found a truly worthy opponent in the local weather wars: Mike Morgan, a native of nearby Tulsa who had been hired by Channel 5 as a deputy to Shattuck two years before. When Shattuck left to take a job in Los Angeles, Morgan was promoted to chief meteorologist at KOCO. He was only twenty-six—and on most days he looked younger than that. He was tall and skinny with thick, dark brown hair. Some women thought he looked a little like the dreamy Jake Ryan from
Sixteen Candles,
and they oohed and aahed over him when he made public appearances, including at the annual state fair—where Morgan was often the popular attraction at the KOCO booth.

But behind his youthful good looks was a true weather geek. Twenty-four years younger than England, Morgan had never known a world where television didn’t exist. He had become intrigued by the weather at a time when Oklahoma television was just starting to cover storms in a real way. His father, a real estate broker, was as obsessed with storms as he was, and together they’d jump in the car and chase tornadoes across northeast Oklahoma.

On June 8, 1974, Morgan’s father heard that a wild storm was headed their way. It had produced a tornado that hit the National Weather Service’s office in Oklahoma City, knocking it out of commission for a bit. He grabbed his son and they jumped in the car and drove right into the heart of the storm as it blew into Tulsa. This was the exact opposite of how people were told to behave around tornadoes, and decades later Morgan regularly told his viewers on air to get out of the path of storms. But on that night the future weatherman and his father parked near Oral Roberts University and watched as the tornado passed them by. Decades later Morgan, who was ten at the time, could still vividly recall how he smushed his face against the cool glass of the car window, watching the cottonwood trees above him sway wildly in the wind and rain. It was too dark to see it, but the tornado had passed almost overhead, and Morgan was hooked. He couldn’t imagine doing anything with his life other than chasing that big storm.

And chase it he did. At thirteen he talked his way into an internship at the Tulsa office of the National Weather Service, where he did anything he was asked just to be close to the action. Two years later he met Don Woods, a legendary television meteorologist at Tulsa’s KTUL, and though he didn’t even have a driver’s license, he talked Woods into letting him chase storms and photograph them for the station—usually with his dad. After attending the University of Oklahoma, where he studied meteorology, Morgan landed his first on-air job at KJRH, the NBC affiliate in Tulsa. He was only twenty-two, but even then he was a walking, talking encyclopedia of storms.

Twenty-seven years later, Morgan knew so much about storms that it sometimes seemed as if the information came spilling out: He couldn’t quite stop himself from going on and on about them, dropping random tidbits about the width of a storm or how it compared with a tornado here or there. And not just in Oklahoma. He could channel storms all over the country. If there were ever a
Jeopardy!
tournament based solely on tornado trivia, Morgan would have been the grand champion and then some. He seemed to know every detail of every storm. Sometimes, when you met him, it was hard to tell if he was being a book-smart weather obsessive or if he was showing off. Some suspected his endless banter to be rooted in insecurity, a feeling that he had to prove he knew his stuff—because Morgan, even if he sometimes won in the ratings, could never quite emerge from the shadow of the great Gary England. That know-it-all need to display his knowledge was a personality tic that rubbed many people the wrong way—including England, who could barely contain his disdain for his younger rival, a feeling that was abundantly mutual.

 • • • 

Nobody could really say how the bad blood had begun. It was just there, like a severe storm that had exploded out of nowhere. These two men’s open hated for each other became a juicy subplot in the regular drama of Oklahoma weather every spring. People compared it to the Red River rivalry—the legendary college football showdown between the OU Sooners and the University of Texas Longhorns. But it was more like a soap opera, where the ever-changing drama of who had besmirched whom was the talk of morning radio. In the early 1990s people flipped back and forth between KWTV, England’s station, and KOCO, where Morgan worked, trying to keep up with the various digs the two made at each other—though to catch them you had to listen closely. Both were careful never to actually mention the other’s name on air. It was always “the other guys” or “the other station” or, as England once described Morgan, “one
young
television meteorologist at another station.” There was never any mystery to anyone in Oklahoma as to whom they were talking about.

One of the earliest skirmishes I remember erupted in 1990, when Gary England unveiled his “First Warning,” a tiny graphic map positioned in one corner of the television screen that allowed the station to show in which region a storm watch or warning had been issued without interrupting programming. It was a key invention that was quickly embraced nationwide and is still used today in every city in the country. Almost simultaneously KOCO, under Morgan’s direction, unveiled a similar technology called “First Alert,” only its version automatically popped up on the screen when the National Weather Service issued a warning or a watch—whereas England’s version, KOCO coyly pointed out, had to be manually updated. That the two inventions came out within days of each other immediately prompted heated charges of espionage on both sides. Who had come up with the idea? England ultimately retained the credit. Morgan, who didn’t have many defenders, felt he had been unfairly denied a well-earned victory.

When Morgan quit KOCO to work for KFOR in 1993, the weather wars only intensified. The two men battled over who had the best radar and who was the fastest to get out tornado warnings. That year England went after KFOR when one of its storm chasers frantically claimed on air that he had seen a tornado doing major damage in the tiny town of Ryan, Oklahoma. England saw no major storm on the Doppler, and KWTV’s chasers, who happened to be parked right near the KFOR staffer, didn’t see any damage either. At England’s urging, KWTV ran an exposé accusing KFOR of hyping storms for the purpose of ratings, which it deemed “irresponsible.” KFOR fired the storm chaser, but the station and its defenders retaliated by accusing England of racheting up the ratings war by, among other things, dispatching KWTV’s helicopter to fly near tornadoes when the value of that kind of coverage was questionable. Ironically, years later all the stations would have storm chasers in helicopters in the air—Oklahoma City is the only city in the country where people regularly take such risks to track storms.

At KOCO, Morgan claimed credit for being the first station in the country to equip its storm chasers with the capability to send still photos of storms over military satellite phones. Early in his tenure at KFOR, he took this one step further, giving his team cameras that transmitted live video of the storms over cell phones. But England refused to give an inch. He bragged that a KWTV anchor had already transmitted video between two Macintosh computers using cellular phone lines. Indeed, he seemed to take delight in even the littlest triumphs over his rival.

 • • • 

In 1995 much of Oklahoma erupted in excitement when it was announced that the film
Twister,
a movie produced by Steven Spielberg about storm chasers, would be filmed in the state. England was tapped as a technical adviser, and he and several other local meteorologists, including Morgan, were cast in bit parts. In the opening scene the film showed archival footage of England from the 1970s declaring a tornado warning, and he and Rick Mitchell, a friendly, easygoing meteorologist who had replaced Morgan at KOCO, were featured later in the film during warning sequences. But Morgan was seen in the film only in passing—briefly glimpsed on a television screen in the opening minutes of the film. Afterward England joked that he had finally claimed the ultimate triumph over Morgan and KFOR: In the movie he had saved Helen Hunt’s life.

Even
Twister
couldn’t bring an end to the weather wars. At the film’s red-carpet premiere in Oklahoma City, which was attended by Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton, Rick Mitchell, who had never met his competitors, watched with a mix of amazement and amusement as England worked the room like a presidential candidate—shaking hands and patting backs. Mitchell got the cold shoulder both from him and from Morgan—though Morgan’s wife, Marla, a beautiful and outgoing former rodeo queen, went out of her way to say hello to both of her husband’s rivals. England and Morgan were just feet apart at one point, but they didn’t speak to each other or to Mitchell, who until then had not fully grasped the intensity of competition in the Oklahoma City weather market.

Generally friendly, without much of a taste for warfare, Mitchell emerged as the calm counterpoint to the weather war between England and Morgan. His drama was mostly with Mother Nature. In 1998 Mitchell was live on air when a tornado took aim at the station. While he remained at the weather desk, a reporter and a cameraman peered out the station’s back door, where they saw a funnel cloud furiously rotating over the station. Even as Mitchell warned people to take cover, the reporter looked up at the storm until suddenly he screamed that it was on the ground. Several loud crashes later, the screen went black, but viewers could hear Mitchell’s deep baritone, calm and reassuring against the backdrop of people screaming like something out of horror movie. “I have just experienced a tornado. It passed not thirty feet from the station,” Mitchell said in a matter-of-fact voice, so calm it sounded as if nothing unusual had happened. “If we’re still on, I want to alert everyone: We’re okay.” The storm had wrecked the station and left a large dent in the dome covering its Doppler radar—even as it missed KFOR just down the road. After that KOCO saw a bump in the ratings, thanks in part to the no-drama Mitchell.

 • • • 

One of the most fraught battles in the weather wars was over which station had the best radar technology. It was a never-ending arms race that escalated every spring—until 2005, when Morgan finally seemed to win a clear victory by obtaining the equivalent of a nuclear weapon in the war over radars: KFOR built a one-million-watt Doppler radar and erected it just southwest of Moore, right in the path of the May 3, 1999, tornado, where storms seemed to constantly erupt. It was, Morgan bragged, four times stronger than the Doppler radars used by the other television stations in town, giving it a more comprehensive and broader view of weather in the region. The station could now get better reads on storms heading into the state from Texas or Kansas. And KFOR would continue to use its old Doppler as well—making it the only station with two Dopplers at its disposal. Morgan had finally bested KWTV on technology—though England would have none of it.

Despite the fierceness of their rivalry, Morgan and England actually had many things in common. They were both obsessed with the weather and its power—and had been since they were kids. They were both outwardly concerned with warning times and protecting people in the path of the storms. And both found it hard to walk away from their jobs after hours. While Morgan actually did have some hobbies—he liked to build model trains—he was consumed with the coverage and how to make it better. After so many deadly storms, he had a hard time comprehending how some people could choose not to pay attention to the weather or simply ignore warnings. He didn’t understand how so many people continued to die. On particularly stormy days Morgan was far more emotional than England. His coverage had an edge, a sky-is-falling sense of drama that the other stations didn’t—and though people criticized it, they watched, and KFOR began to win in the ratings.

But Morgan was still in England’s shadow—and though he tried to connect with people in a personal way, as England had early in his career, something was off. In 2010 Morgan’s wife gave him a tie covered in tiny rhinestones that he began to wear on the worst storm days. KFOR started a Facebook page and a Twitter feed about Morgan’s “Bedazzled Severe Weather Tie.” Morgan said he wore it in the hope that viewers who caught only a glimpse of him would realize it was a particularly bad-weather day, but it proved to be as incendiary as his coverage. People either loved it or hated it. Though he had helped KFOR be competitive and even win the ratings war, he didn’t seem to enjoy himself on air. Even among his colleagues he came off as defensive and testy. He couldn’t understand why people railed on him for being dramatic when England, in his view, was far worse. It came down to one crucial difference between the two: While England’s folksy manner helped mask his fierce competitive streak, Morgan found it harder to hide his emotions. He couldn’t shake the perception that he was a know-it-all, concerned above all with winning the ratings game.

The fierce competition between the two men was in many ways good for viewers. It made storm forecasting in Oklahoma City better than in any other market in the country, and people became more fluent as a result in the science of storms. It was one big reality show that was also a lesson in the weather. Over the years, the stations went to great extremes to stay on top, recruiting talent and poaching the competition.

One of the biggest hires was Jim Gardner, a helicopter pilot originally from Oklahoma who had been working in Los Angeles for decades. He had won an Emmy for his aerial coverage of O. J. Simpson fleeing the police in his white Bronco in 1994. He’d covered earthquakes and mudslides and fires—and had even flown some Hollywood helicopter stunt work on his off time. But nothing compared with the thrill of flying into the storms back in Oklahoma, where Gardner, working for KFOR, seemed to get perilously close to gigantic tornadoes, giving people at home a high-definition view of Mother Nature’s fury. On May 3, 1999, Gardner became a household name when he flew for more than an hour tracking one of the strongest tornadoes ever recorded on the face of the earth. But unlike Morgan, who grew distressed at the sight of the storm and the death and damage in its wake, Gardner had nerves of steel and a calm, folksy air that reminded some of Gary England.