The Mercy of the Sky: The Story of a Tornado (6 page)

As he left his house that morning to head to his office, Eddy felt that familiar feeling in the air. He knew another storm was coming, and there was nothing he could do to stop it. All he could do was prepare for the worst and hope God or luck would be on Moore’s side.

T
he sun was barely up when Rick Smith reached his desk at the National Weather Service in Norman. It felt like he had never left. His computer was still on, and he thought he could feel a hint of warmth in his chair, though he knew that was just in his head. His wife sometimes teased him about her missing husband. “Have you seen him?” she’d ask with a mischievous smile. She knew as well as he did that this was just the way it was in the stormy month of May. It’s how it had always been in the twenty years since he’d joined the National Weather Service as a meteorologist—and even before that, when he was just a kid staring up at the clouds above Memphis. He’d always been watching and waiting for the perfect storm.

Smith had turned forty-nine a few months earlier. His once-dark-blond hair had grown thinner and was almost white now, giving his skin a pinkish glow. Behind his wire-rim glasses one could detect a few more lines around his blue eyes, signs of a life well lived. But even as the calendar ticked forward, he still felt like that kid looking up at the sky. The mystery was as compelling to him now as it had been when he was just a boy. Early on in his career, he’d been out in the field spotting storms for the Weather Service, chasing tornadoes along the back roads of Tennessee, Arkansas, and occasionally Oklahoma. But now he mostly followed the storms through a bank of computer screens and on television, and though he sometimes missed that smell and how the sky looked as it transformed everything around him, it wasn’t any less of a thrill.

He’d started out as a forecaster, but over the years he had become something of a do-it-all at the Weather Service. He trained storm spotters. He dealt with the media. His official title was “warning coordination meteorologist,” which meant it was his job to talk to emergency services and other government officials in cities that were likely to be hit, getting out as much advance warning as possible. Recently he’d taken on another increasingly important task: He ran the agency’s Twitter and Facebook feeds when things heated up.

While most people in Oklahoma watched storm coverage on television, Smith agonized over how to reach those who didn’t—those who had no television or had become blasé because there were so many storms. People always said they were afraid of getting hit by a tornado, but the truth was many didn’t actually believe it could happen to them. Those were the people Smith worried about the most—the ones who had grown used to the weather and had stopped taking it seriously. Social media, he hoped, might be a way of getting warnings out to them.

The night before, he had been at the office almost until midnight. It had been a day of unusually high drama at the Weather Service, which was saying something. Oklahoma had been in the midst of a severe-weather outbreak for days, as massive storms meandered through the central part of the state. Spring was often like this, endless hours on duty, living on coffee and Diet Coke and whatever else the vending machines downstairs offered, waiting and wondering what Mother Nature would do.

Just before 5:00
P.M.
, things had gotten weird. A cloud had popped up on radar just to the west of the office and then exploded into a large, rotating thunderstorm—known in weather terms as a supercell. The ominous storm began to suck the air and energy from everything around it as it crouched down and grew wider on the landscape. Inside the forecasting center one of the meteorologists calmly issued a tornado warning for the storm almost directly above their heads, maintaining such a cool and steady focus one might have been forgiven for thinking it was all happening hundreds of miles away.

There was no panic or yelling—beyond the voice of a frantic storm chaser echoing from one of the giant monitors that would stream the local television stations on bad-weather days. While it was Armageddon on television—and outside the window too—the Weather Service was a quiet hum of activity, like a bank on payday.

On particularly bad-weather days, forecasters will sometimes get a little edgy, but this is only really apparent to people who know them well enough to notice the chink in their calm veneer. Over the years, Smith had become adept at reading their body language. He monitored the radars and absorbed the data just like everyone else, but he was also able to detect that slight difference in temperament, the way someone’s jaw would tense or brow furrow, or that hint of something in the voice. It was his gauge of how bad a severe-weather day was likely to be. If they were nervous, he was nervous. And on that day you could slice the tension with a knife.

The National Weather Service offices are located on the second floor of the sprawling National Weather Center, at the southern end of the University of Oklahoma campus in Norman. Only a decade before, the area had been mostly empty farmland, but the NWC, as it was known, had quickly transformed the landscape when it opened in 2006, a gleaming, nearly 300,000-square-foot glass-and-brick monument to the study of weather. You could see it from more than a mile away, especially at night, when, lit up like a giant cathedral, it stood out sharply against the dark woods of Highway 9.

That it looked like a church seemed fitting. If tornadoes were something of a religion for those who followed them, central Oklahoma was the holy land, and this building was a sacred place that drew in those who were most captivated by the mystery of the storm. Virtually every major weather agency in the country could be found here. Down the hall from the National Weather Service were two sister agencies: the Storm Prediction Center, an arm of the Weather Service that does severe-weather forecasting for the entire country, and the National Severe Storms Laboratory, which leads research into the genesis of storms and seeks to develop technology to better predict them. Upstairs on the fifth floor were the offices and classrooms of the University of Oklahoma’s School of Meteorology, widely considered the Ivy League of weather programs, where some of the nation’s leading scientists were training the next generation of meteorologists.

Over the years, the NWC had become a weather mecca, drawing pilgrims from around the country. In the surrounding few blocks the university had built out roads leading to office buildings that were so brand-new there was no grass on the lawns out front, just freshly raked dirt. Inside, offices were rented to private companies in the weather business eager to be as close as possible to the scientists with whom they partnered on projects like improving radars and coming up with new and better ways of presenting weather data. Already there wasn’t enough space to meet the demand.

On the east side of the burgeoning weather campus was a giant white dome with diamond-shaped indentations that, sitting high on stilts in the trees above Highway 9, resembled a gigantic golf ball teed up for play. It was the radar that changed everything about weather forecasting. The Doppler radar was first employed by the air force to track enemy positions during World War II, but military officials soon noticed that the short pulses of radio waves emitted by the radar were also picking up details about storms. The Doppler could measure the intensity of precipitation within a storm as well as its development and movement. But it wasn’t until decades later, in the 1950s, that it was officially adopted as a weather-forecasting tool.

Doppler radars now dot the landscape of central Oklahoma—there are at least four in Norman alone, positioned to capture the storms that regularly roll up from the southwest—but in 1969, when the Severe Storms Lab relocated its offices from Kansas City, the first Doppler radar to be used for weather purposes was installed just outside its offices along Interstate 35 in Norman. It was surplus equipment handed over by the air force. Back then the locals eyed the giant golf ball–shaped radar with curiosity, wondering how something so weird looking could possibly help them understand the freak, killer storms that hit with almost no notice.

Four years later the radar proved its usefulness. In May 1973, when a giant F4 tornado blew through Union City, about 30 miles west of Oklahoma City, the Doppler radar in Norman captured for the first time the entire life cycle of a twister. It was a breakthrough that changed the science of weather forecasting forever. For the first time scientists could see how a tornado had come to life, how it had picked up in intensity and then, just as suddenly, faded away. The radar had revealed signs of a possible tornado developing long before it actually hit the ground—proving that it might be possible to expand warning times exponentially for potentially deadly storms. It was the official beginning of decades of research into storms that nobody really understood.

Over the last forty years researchers have become increasingly skilled at detecting and forecasting the environment most prone to creating tornadoes. In the beginning there is usually a thunderstorm that, in the simplest terms, erupts when warm and cool air fronts collide. The warm air rises, pushed up by the cooler air, and as its temperature drops, it releases moisture, generates energy, and causes instability. Sometimes the outcome is just rain and lightning, a result of the energy created when frozen raindrops collide in the upper echelon of the clouds. But in Oklahoma the base ingredients are more volatile. Intensely moist air from the Gulf of Mexico will often collide with cool, dry air wafting down from Canada over the Rockies, and the two forces are further churned together by the jet stream, a fast-moving current that flows west to east directly over the state. Scientists have observed that the jet stream causes the warm, sticky air to rise more quickly, in what is called an updraft, and the cool, dry air to fall in a downdraft.

When the elements are particularly unstable—when, for instance, one finds significantly varied temperatures and moisture levels—those crosscurrents will sometimes coalesce in a supercell. That is when tornadoes are sometimes produced. Supercells are longer lasting and more dangerous than other storms because their updraft of warm air is often ever so slightly tilted, feeding more surface moisture into the storm. This causes the winds to rotate ever more furiously and to form a vortex of air known as a mesocyclone, which is visible on radar if not to the naked eye. It is the next step that most baffles meteorologists: In some storms the vortex narrows and lengthens, dropping out of the clouds and aiming for the ground. As it does so, its spin becomes still more furious and lethal. And yet, even if the conditions are ripe, not every supercell will produce a tornado. Scientists still have no idea why that is. Some speculate that it has something to do with the temperature of the air wrapping around the mesocyclone within the storm, but the truth is they simply do not know. Tornadogenesis, the scientific term for how tornadoes are born, remains a frustratingly incomplete science.

One of the simple reasons for this is the difficulty of amassing reliable data. Who could ever hope to penetrate the eye of a storm and emerge to tell the tale? Even if you could build a strong enough gadget, how could you position it in the right path? The Doppler did not fully resolve the mystery, but it did increase our understanding of the conditions that might lead to the formation of tornadoes and thereby significantly increased warning times. On May 19 the meteorologists at the National Weather Service saw the possible tornado coming almost fifteen minutes before it nearly hit them—an eternity in forecasting terms—thanks to their Doppler radar.

As emergency sirens began to wail, nonessential staff rushed downstairs to a partially underground theater, where live coverage of the storm from the local television stations was being projected on screens. Gary England was on—as were his counterparts at the other stations: KFOR’s Mike Morgan and KOCO’s Damon Lane. At one point there was an odd moment when the researchers and students in the room found themselves staring at three separate live pictures of the sky literally right outside their door as increasingly frantic storm chasers raced down the back roads of Norman trying to stay ahead of the storm. It wasn’t just chasers working for the local television stations; there were amateurs out there too, whose vehicles were outfitted with cameras that recorded their surroundings. It had a bit of the feel of a bad disaster movie. There was an edge in the room, but no one panicked. Some were actually disappointed. The students in the room who had come to OU to study storms like this itched to get outside or go on the roof of the building, to the open-air classroom where on certain days they were invited to sit at desks and study the sky around them. But that day they were told it was too dangerous: They would have to wait for another storm.

Upstairs, top officials at the Weather Service were considering what would happen if they were to take a direct hit. In anticipation of Oklahoma’s wild weather, the facility had been built out of bulletproof glass and the walls reinforced with Kevlar. They were said to be able to withstand winds of 250 miles per hour, and a backup power generator could supposedly keep the building running for three days. But nobody knew if this was actually true. It had yet to be tested. Though a few small twisters had hit in the seven years since the building had been erected, the worst storms had bypassed Norman, either heading to the north, toward Moore, or staying south.

Smith and his colleagues calmly went over the backup plan, reviewing how they would relocate their staff to the Weather Service’s old headquarters on the north side of town near the airport. Satellite agency offices around the region were on standby to take over operations if the worst happened. Still, it was hard to fathom a direct hit. Smith could hardly believe a storm capable of producing a tornado was literally in their backyard, taking aim at the people whose job it was to warn and protect the public. Mother Nature had one sick sense of humor.

The National Weather Service issued an official warning, telling everyone in Norman to take cover—a point Smith reiterated on Twitter. “DO NOT look for it,” he tweeted. “Take cover right now!” In Oklahoma people will sometimes stay out in their front yards to watch approaching storms, their curiosity and awe trumping any natural sense of fear. The country singer Toby Keith, who grew up in Moore, had even written a song about the phenomenon—“Trailerhood”—which poked fun at people who, when the storm sirens blare, race outside with “a six pack and a lawn chair” waiting for the tornado to come. Even meteorologists aren’t immune. As they warned people to take cover and move into shelters or relocate to interior rooms, some of the scientists in the office left their cubicles and ran to the windows to watch the storm taking shape just west of the building. It was a rare opportunity for people who spent their professional lives tracking twisters on radar to physically see one with their own eyes unfolding before them. Smith was right there with them—watching the storm with the same curiosity and fear that had captivated him as a kid.