The Mercy of the Sky: The Story of a Tornado (7 page)

One of his earliest weather memories was of being frozen in fear at claps of thunder so loud they shook his house. He ran to his parents, terrified by the darkening clouds that seemed as if they were out to get him. But that fear soon turned into fascination, and the next thing he knew, he was standing outside as the storm approached, looking up at the sky, unable to tear his eyes away. That fascination—the awe of what Mother Nature could do—was what had driven him to become a meteorologist. He wanted to understand what was happening in the sky around him. Almost everybody who worked in weather for a living had a similar story—the storm that had hooked them for life.

As precarious as Sunday’s storm had appeared, the tornado had stayed in the clouds as it passed over Norman, sparing the Weather Service a direct hit. It had touched the ground a short while later northeast of town, in the wide-open farmland east of Moore, rapidly increasing to an EF4 tornado with winds approaching 200 miles per hour. It had wiped out a mobile-home park and heavily damaged or destroyed dozens of homes before crossing Interstate 40, where it picked up several tractor-trailer trucks and slammed them to the ground, shattering them into pieces. Among the farmhouses it had hit was one belonging to my aunt.

As night fell and the storms finally fizzled out, Smith and his colleagues had watched local coverage of the tornado damage, accompanied by terrifying up-close footage of the giant twister captured from different angles by storm chasers on the ground and by the local news stations’ helicopters, which had followed it in the air. They had wondered about the death toll—which still hadn’t been released—and considered their own narrow miss. Why had it spared them but not others?

They’d had little time to stop and ponder the storm’s trajectory. Forecasters on staff were already predicting that another round of storms was on its way Monday—even worse than what they’d seen in recent days. A dry line of air was coming off the Rocky Mountains to the northwest that would collide with unstable tropical moisture pushed up from the Gulf of Mexico—the key ingredients for deadly thunderstorms. Radar projections suggested the worst of it would be concentrated right over central Oklahoma. Sometimes you didn’t need the radar to know trouble was brewing. As Smith had left the office early Monday morning, walking out to his car in the dark, he had been hit by a blast of thick, humid air.

Now, inside the building on the second floor, Smith was at his desk analyzing the forecast again. He saw his boss, David Andra, walk by. Andra looked tense and nervous, which was all the data Smith needed to know it was going to be a rough day. He had scheduled a conference call with city officials in the region and updated the Weather Service’s Twitter feed once that morning—just after 6:30
A.M.
—urging his followers to “get ready” for more severe storms that afternoon. At his desk he looked over data suggesting the worst of the weather would begin to fire up around 1:00
P.M.
—hours earlier than usual. He thought of the kids who would be in school at that hour. “Attention school systems, parents and students!!” Smith wrote on Twitter. “We may be dealing with dangerous storms at school dismissal time! Plan ahead!”

He hoped it would be enough, but in the back of his mind he felt a creeping sense of unease.

N
ext to the National Weather Center was a parking lot covered by a giant awning where storm chasers working with the University of Oklahoma and weather agencies kept their trucks, outfitted with mobile radars and other devices. One of the largest of these resembled a king cab pickup on steroids. The bed had been removed, and in the back was a giant mobile Doppler radar that looked a bit like a satellite dish. But it was no ordinary radar.

The RaXpol—short for Rapid X-Pol—is a polarimetric radar eight feet in diameter that sends out pulse waves into the storm. These can measure it not only horizontally but also vertically, giving scientists a more precise read on its size and shape. Firmly hooked into the back of the truck, the RaXpol can rotate at 180 degrees per second—capturing the full atmospheric blueprint of a tornado in seconds. This speed is important because tornadoes change rapidly—so much so that scientists still don’t have a full grasp of why some storms produce vortices and others don’t, or why some stay on the ground for an hour while others disappear in seconds. They know more than they did twenty years ago, but not enough.

Next to the truck stood the RaXpol’s operator, Howard Bluestein, who had spent his entire life trying to solve this riddle. A meteorology professor at OU, Bluestein was widely regarded as one of the weather gods among the scientists. He was one of the best-known storm chasers in the world, a man who was out in the field following tornadoes long before the chase became a form of entertainment or, for some, a sport.

If you had sent out a casting memo for a storm scientist, Bluestein, at sixty-four, would have fit the bill. Standing midheight, with a mat of wiry gray hair, he was known for his distinctive way of dressing while chasing the storms. He almost always wore the same thing: a wrinkled shirt and knee-length khaki shorts with tennis shoes and tall, blindingly white socks. It was the socks that his students and colleagues teased him about. Back in the 1970s they’d gone up only to his ankles, but as he’d gotten older, they had slowly inched up his skinny calves, higher and higher. Part of it was utility: Bluestein was known to sprint through the open, grassy fields of Oklahoma’s countryside with his camera to get a good shot of a tornado. It was often too hot to wear jeans, and his tall white socks were like cotton armor protecting his skin from the fire ants, chiggers, and thorny sticker-burr weeds that were often hidden in the deep grass. But that didn’t stop the teasing. His students took pictures of him ogling tornadoes. “The tornado, Dr. Bluestein and his socks,” one was captioned.

Bluestein didn’t mind the ribbing. He had a healthy sense of humor and, for a scientist, was remarkably easygoing. His voice was soft and always seemed to have a tinge of awe when he was talking about the weather. He had an almost constant look of joy on his face, especially if you caught him out in the field watching a storm rise up on the wide expanse of the Oklahoma landscape. It never got old. The sky, he told his students, was nature’s finest art museum, with a constantly changing exhibit that could blow you away—not just with its beauty but with its physical power too.

Bluestein had been at OU since 1976, and over the years his gentle voice had developed a subtle drawl. His students were often surprised to hear he was actually from Massachusetts, just outside Boston. Some had the obvious question: How did a Yankee end up here? While Boston wasn’t known for severe weather, other than its massive snows in the winter, Bluestein could point to that “one storm” that blew through when he was a kid, the one that changed his life and left him transfixed.

It was June 1953, and he was only four years old at the time. But he could still vividly recall how he’d been outside in the yard playing when the sky had turned a strange, hazy greenish yellow. The wind picked up, and his mother ordered him to come inside. A tornado had been reported in Worcester, about 40 miles to the west—something that was practically unheard of in New England. It was so rare that local television in Boston had interrupted programming to warn of the approaching storm—public tornado warnings did not exist at the time.

The only tornado he’d ever heard of was the one that carried Dorothy and her dog, Toto, away in
The Wizard of Oz.
When he protested, not wanting to go inside, his mother warned him that the storm that was coming would snatch him up into the sky and take him away. Little Howie, as he was known, ran into the house and kept his eyes glued to the window, waiting to see if a twister would come and carry him, like Dorothy, to Oz.

That tornado never made it to Chelsea, the Boston suburb where Bluestein lived, but horrific stories soon circulated of what it had done to Worcester. People spoke of a large, dark cloud of smoke descending on the city with winds no one had ever experienced before. Almost everything in its path was obliterated, including heavy brick buildings that dated back more than a century. The tornado was reported to have marched on for nearly ninety minutes across a span of almost 50 miles, during which time it killed 94 people and injured 1,200. Roughly ten thousand people lost their homes.

The stories of that storm mesmerized the four-year-old, who was far too young to understand the workings of the weather. Forecasting and the science of storms were almost nonexistent back then, though people had been chasing storms for centuries, drawn by their terrifying power. One of America’s earliest storm chasers was Benjamin Franklin, who became an accidental meteorologist in 1752 when he sought to prove that lightning was a form of electricity, legend has it, by flying a kite attached to a metal key in the middle of a thunderstorm to test whether it would attract a charge.

But Franklin’s fascination wasn’t limited to lightning. He is credited with being the first person to have noticed that storms typically move from southwest to northeast—a discovery he made in 1753. Two years later, in 1755, he wrote to a friend to tell him of how he’d been chasing “a small whirlwind” on horseback through the Maryland countryside, watching the funnel as it got bigger and bigger. At one point he lashed at it with a whip to see if it could be broken up, but it seemed impervious to his intervention and darted onward into a forest. When limbs began to rain down upon him from the sky, Franklin became “apprehensive of the danger,” he wrote, and stopped, watching as the funnel continued through the trees only to dissipate over a nearby tobacco field.

Franklin didn’t call what he saw a “tornado.” It isn’t in fact clear when that word was first used. The consensus seems to be that it was most likely a play on
tornar,
a Spanish word that means “to turn.” Some people called it a twister, and L. Frank Baum wrote that it was a “cyclone” that carried Dorothy and Toto off from Kansas to the great land of Oz, but by then people knew enough about the word “tornado” to fear it. In the late 1800s the U.S. government went so far as to ban the word “tornado” from its internal weather forecasts, distributed mostly within the military, to avoid inciting panic. The ban wasn’t lifted until the late 1930s, but even after that the U.S. Army Signal Corps, which was in charge of forecasts at that time, still largely refrained from using the word.

It wasn’t until 1952 that the government began publicly issuing tornado watches and warnings—though they were widely derided as inaccurate. While people spoke of major storms that had hit in the past, it was only in the 1950s that official scientific records began to be kept of tornadoes—where they had hit, how many people had died, and the extent of the damage. But the records were inconsistent because there was no standard and generally no understanding of how to truly measure the impact of a tornado.

In 1954 Bluestein’s home was hit by a hurricane with winds so strong they tore the tiles off the roof. He and his parents cowered inside, afraid the winds might tear their home completely apart. Between this storm and the tornado that had hit the year before, Bluestein became obsessed with the atmosphere around him, though there was little information in his secondary-school textbooks about the science of weather. It was too obscure.

When the time came to think of college, he enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received a doctorate degree in meteorology, focusing his studies on tropical weather and severe storms. In his last year of graduate school in 1976, Bluestein met Edwin Kessler, an MIT graduate who had moved to Oklahoma to head up the National Severe Storms Lab. Kessler suggested that he come to Oklahoma to study the violent weather, but Bluestein’s image of Oklahoma was of a vast dust bowl, something that did not appeal to him whatsoever. Still, he could not resist the lure of the storms, and that summer after graduation, he moved to Norman. Over the years, as he liked to joke, Oklahoma had become something of a paradise to him: a weather junkie in the land of tornadoes.

Starting in the 1970s, thousands of meteorologists moved to Oklahoma to be close to the severe weather. The meteorology school at OU became the largest program in the country—with more than five hundred students enrolled and hundreds more turned away every year simply because there was no room for them. Those who didn’t get in sometimes came to Oklahoma anyway, and they studied Mother Nature on their own, packing the roads alongside other meteorologists from all over the country who came to study Oklahoma’s legendary storms. A running joke in Oklahoma when I was growing up was that during the spring you couldn’t throw a rock without hitting a weather scientist. They were everywhere.

Howard Bluestein hit the open road almost as soon as he arrived. It wasn’t long before he experienced his first tornado, and even now he remembers it in specific detail. It was May 20, 1977, when he and a group of students chased a giant tornado that hit the ground in Tipton, a tiny town in the southwest near the Texas border. Driving down a narrow country road, he stopped the car when he saw a silhouette of a vortex crossing the road directly in front of them. Tall and slender like an elephant’s trunk, it looked like none of the photographs he’d ever seen. He began to photograph it, the first of many pictures he would take of the thousands of tornadoes he would see in his career.

The excitement of seeing something he had been captivated by for so many years sent adrenaline coursing through his veins, but afterward Bluestein felt guilty. Driving up the road, he found a house missing its roof and scores of power lines that had been ripped apart and thrown to the ground. It was minor damage compared with the things he would see later in life, but he suddenly felt a sickening feeling. How could he have been so excited to see a storm that might have killed someone? It was a tension that everyone who follows storms for a living will at some point experience: You want the storms to be interesting, and when you are chasing one, you have that feeling of anticipation, that excitement and hope that it will develop and produce the tornado you so desperately want to see and study. But that desire often competes with the guilt of knowing how truly terrible storms will ruin people’s lives. Over the years, Bluestein had to remind himself and his students, who went through the same emotions, that they were doing research that would contribute to saving people’s lives, that they were not complicit in the devastation, though they were its witnesses.

Back in the 1970s almost nothing was known about what was happening inside a tornado. Radar technology offered only so much insight. Bluestein knew that the secret to understanding tornadoes was to somehow get inside them—to measure the winds and gather data on their structure so as to gauge what was happening inside the storms at the moment when they produced a funnel. People had dreamed up ways of doing this before, but none had come to fruition. In the 1970s a scientist offered to drive an armored tank into the path of a tornado, but it was dismissed as a crazy idea—though storm chasers almost thirty years later would eventually do just that. In 1979 Bluestein met Al Bedard and Carl Ramzy, two scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and together they came up with the idea of racing ahead of a tornado and deploying a device in its path that would be strong enough to withstand the winds and sophisticated enough to provide actual data about what was going on inside the storm. At a cocktail party in the summer of 1980, the trio, slightly inebriated, came up with the name of their four-hundred-pound, barrel-shaped device: the Totable Tornado Observatory, or TOTO, named after Dorothy’s dog in
The Wizard of Oz.

The following spring Bluestein and his colleagues tried to put TOTO in front of a tornado, but almost every time, as if it knew what they were up to, the tornado shifted course or simply lifted up and disappeared back into the sky. As the men struggled to get the massive machine loaded back into their truck, lighting often struck around them, exposing them to another danger: The device was basically a lightning rod in the middle of storms. In 1982 Bluestein and his team began to take risks they’d never thought they would in a desperate effort to intercept a tornado. Near Altus, Oklahoma, they drove directly into a storm. Their caravan of cars was pelted with gigantic hailstones and shaken by winds that seemed likely to blow them off the road at any moment. They were putting their lives at risk, Bluestein realized, but the allure of scientific discovery was too great to resist. They raced forward, trying to catch the tornado, but suddenly realized they were too close. The twister crossed the road just to their right, about one hundred yards from the front of their truck. This was closer than Bluestein had ever been before. Power lines fell across the road, shattering the windshield of their van. As they watched in horror, the tornado uprooted trees and destroyed a nearby mobile home. It was a close call, but even then they were not able to deploy their machine in time.

Over the years, Bluestein and his researchers would try again, but in the end it was simply too dangerous. A team from the Severe Storms Lab tried for a few more years, and in the spring of 1985 they almost succeeded. But a weak tornado near Ardmore blew the machine over, and it was retired.